I’d encourage you to look at XTEINK. They kind of started this “baby e-reader” trend and the bonus with their stuff is there’s custom firmware available that makes it SO MUCH easier to use.
Boox has been pretty not-transparent on their intention to support custom firmware and……… I’ve used some of their android based devices. They’re nice, but their attempt at “simple” for an e-ink display leaves a lot to be desired.
I’m the admin. Every time I try to open it up, I only get guides for doing it on a regular, personal MS account.
Microsoft 365 implementation of passkeys is sacrilegious somehow.
It requires only the Authenticator app from Microsoft and can use nothing else to create the passkey. The way this is implemented on iOS means that Authenticator comes up as an autofill option BUT IT ONLY SUPPORTS M365 and is useless for anything else. Leave it to Microsoft to take an open standard and bastardize it to the point of it being MORE CONVENIENT to just type a damn password.
Probably never found any friends either
Pretty sure everyone wants dildoes as supple as possible
Kind of. GSM (which all but Verizon and formerly Sprint used) let most any phone on the network. CDMA let carriers pick and choose compatible devices. In the early 2010s when Verizon was attempting to buy more spectrum for its 4G network, Google put themselves as a potential buyer, but they wanted the FCC to set a rule for the spectrum that said any phone compatible had to be allowed onto the network. Verizon won that auction and since then Verizon’s been way more open on what they allow.
And with Sprint being purchased by T-Mobile, it would make more sense at this point to have a phone certified for AT&T and T-Mobile and Verizon would just have to let it on the network. These days, a phone being “certified” is Moore just a carrier making the statement of “we’ve tested the phone and we do know it works on the network.“ it doesn’t mean an uncertified phone will never work, it just means that this one should work by all metrics they’re able to tell.
Yeah what a bunch of losers getting certified for 2 of the 3 largest US carriers.
So I work for a smaller regional ISP in the Midwest. I can definitively say every single notice we have ever received about any IP addresses on our network causing a problem has always been a compromised legitimate device on a user’s network. Most of the time it’s somebody installing a shady app on their smart TV/streaming stick.
That’s totally fair!
I appreciate you taking the time to be so thorough with everything here!
My guess is a lot of that rule was created to cut down on the “is this a good server?” Questions. Which I could see becoming a problem.
Maybe a rule specifically calling that out and a weekly “Hardware guidance” post that people can comment and ask those kinds of questions?
Also happy to help. I’ve modded on Reddit a few times and agree with light touch to avoid all the dramatic junk.
You cannot just buy any SFP module and have it work. Most ISPs deploy a “special” (at least compared to normal point to point fiber links) that lets them serve multiple customers out of one port in their office. This is called a Passive Optical Network and requires specialized modules on both ends. There are ways to make a specific SFP work as an ONT and by cloning certain identifiers from the ONT to make the ISP think their box is still there.
This is a lot of effort and from my research, could stop working randomly in some cases.
Yeah, by virtue of not owning the entire connection (which is impossible unless you own the ISP, intermediary providers, and the service you’re connecting to) somebody somewhere is going to see something that may be identifiable to you. There are services that are offered by many companies for huge enterprises that give you basically a direct connection to a data center and a lot of times that traffic can be totally encrypted, but it’s usually for very big enterprises and isn’t cheap to get.
And you’re definitely helping the privacy part running a VPN on the router level, but still, there’s always a chance of something getting leaked. It’s pretty low and gets better all the time, but that chance always exists. It’s the reason why air gapping is still a thing for things that ABSOLUTELY cannot be attacked/compromised/viewed by some random person.
Again, if you’re going off of a privacy stance, you’ve made things hard enough that unless a huge ISP has some kind of agreement to sell data to advertising companies and spending the time to implement services to get you and the 2 percent (which is probably a huge overestimate) of customers taking similar steps, it’s just not worth them making the effort.
For whatever it’s worth, that’s not a huge privacy violation. Most routers auto-identify devices. Most IP scan tools just identify the device by default too.
If it’s a good enough public/hotspot network, they will have “client isolation” turned on and it’ll keep you from seeing any other devices but the actual network equipment.
Some of that is built in (mostly if it’s an ONT/router combination unit). And a lot of what they can see is just because you’re sending all of your traffic through them no matter what VPN you’re running. Knowing MAC addresses is pretty much a requirement for “the internet” to work correctly and, while you can obfuscate a MAC address on some devices, there is a (small) chance that can cause problems too.
I know hearing from someone that actually works for one may not be super convincing, but if your ISP is a smaller provider than like AT&T/Spectrum/Cox, they are almost certainly not going to spy on you just because they want to. I’m a customer of the ISP I work at. If I was told tomorrow I had to turn on some kind of deep packet inspection/intercept/spying service, I’d resist it as much as possible simply because I don’t want to see that and I don’t want someone to see what I’m doing. I can only assume that other companies have similar positions on the matter.
I work for an ISP. There’s a number of ways that that they could have figured it out and probably 98 percent of them are genuinely there as a troubleshooting method and nothing more.
As another user said, if it’s a fiber connected ONT, there’s some remote management tools we can use to see what’s there. Some ONTs have a router built in as well and in some cases, we’ve actually done a site scan of WiFi networks for customers set up like you. We can see all the WiFi devices nearby and pretty quickly tell you “yeah, your speed/connectivity issues are because you have about 80 2.4ghz networks being broadcast around you.”
If they offer their own routers, someone could even do a site scan off of your neighbors routers and get an idea what’s around. If most of your other neighbors are using their own routers ISP provided router and you’re the odd one out, odds are that non-ISP device they’re seeing is you. This one is the least likely though, there’s a number of easier methods to see what’s the device is besides using other devices in neighboring houses.
Additionally, there’s a chance they did document something like “customer is using their own Asus router, not ours” and they just checked ticket/service order history. They could have got this from you telling them in the past, a technician being onsite and seeing this, or as the other comment mentioned, you’re connected to their network, they’re going to see the MAC address of the device plugged into their equipment in a few places pretty easily.
Because you weren’t going to pay. The people that don’t know any better/have the money to spend on a subscription would just as soon pay for the convenience of not doing everything above.
So everyone else has good points but there’s one other part I don’t think was mentioned.
Most ISPs use a PON based network. This lets them connect one fiber in their network and “split” that to up to 128 (or more, depends on the OEM) customers. You need a either GPON (Gigabit passive optical network) or XGS-PON (10 gigabit symmetrical passive optical network) SFP module and usually the ISP has to get a serial number off of that module to provision the proper data service.
This is contingent upon the ISP being willing to do that. The one I currently work for, we really don’t do that except for businesses.
Replying to this before OP asks.
Usenet is distributed across hundreds (thousands maybe?) of servers. It’s centralized in that setting up your own server and getting the same access as joining an existing Usenet server is going to be very difficult (and with Usenet being used for privacy more and more, could be impossible due to admins not trusting a random new person), but in theory one could.
Oh I love giving my atupid reasons the phone is broken. Like, it doesn’t just magically shatter, obviously I broke the thing. My favorite one so far is “Apple Care doesn’t cover heavy scratches, but to trade this thing in, it can’t have heavy scratches?” walks outside, takes off case, not so gently tosses phone into the air “You won’t believe this……”