No, early mobile internet. Predated the smart phone boom.

I consider anything that even touches data (even 3gp or email) and can play MP3s a feature phone. Even if this thing didnt play MP3’s, the fact it can read ebooks I’d say makes it one.

Is 3gp still a thing?

Pfsense is a lot more feature rich than openWRT, especially when it comes to firewall features. Personally I just use openwrt to run my access points.

I would replace that eero unit with an old dell optiplex with pfsense, and forego trying to virtualize PFSense.

Not sure what hardware is in that eero, but if you wanted to keep it as just a basic AP, that isn’t a bad plan.

After that get a second optiplex for publicly hosted stuff. Keep that on a separate port on your PFSense machine, completely firewalled off from the rest of your network via pfsense, only allowing traffic from LAN to your server.

Physically separating your internal network, and publicly hosted services, as much as possible is the goal.

If you can only afford one new piece of hardware, I’d get the pfsense box, and set it up as a wireguard VPN server, disabling the direct port forwards to the VM running Minecraft. Though your friends would need to install a VPN client, and youd have to provide config files.

A used optiplex on eBay usually isn’t much more money to get up and running than most Linux SoC’s after all the adapters and kit is purchased, and they’re usually specced out way better.

Actually if you wanted to do physical DMZ separation, and wireguard you’d really be doing good, but that’s probably a little paranoid.

That’s a feature phone.

Man when’s the last time you heard that one?

You’re adding attack surface by keeping them separated only by vlan. VLAN hopping exploits exist, especially in older firmware, ESPECIALLY on EoL units.

Pfsense is a proper router/firewall built on one of the most hardened networking stacks on the planet. Plus it catches regular software updates, no matter how old your hardware is. You can run it on an old PC with a cheap quad gigabit nic card from eBay if you’d like.

If I might ask, what do you have handling your inter-vlan routing/firewall? Is it the same box you use to handle the firewall/routing between your WAN and LAN?

Is this machine sitting in your LAN, or on its own firewalled off network with a DMZ? No matter how secure it is, you don’t want it on the same network as the machine you do your taxes on.

A good poor mans option is to get a pfsense box with 3 NIC’s. One for WAN, one for LAN, and one for the machine you publicly host with.

Setup firewall rules so that LAN can reach the MC host on needed ports, but not the other way around.

Depends, the younger half that’s adjacent to gen alpha? Sure.

On the other side of that coin, I’m in my mid 20s. Not sure about the rest of the older members of gen-z, but my first experience with a computer was Classic Mac OS and Reader Rabbit.

I barely remember when we got the late PIII purple Compaq presario running XP when I was like 3/4. Playing red faction, and shit my brother showed me on new grounds. I remember my mom showing me how to pirate sabbath using Morpheus. Filling the machine up with useless IE toolbars.

Early YouTube was fucking sweet in the worst way possible, though at first I had to sneak it because that was considered a not-for-kids site at the time.

No one my age really touched a smartphone til like middle/highschool. By then we where all already playing halo:CE and early releases of MC on the win 7 machines in the lab.

I personally had already had basic Photoshop/paint.net and scripting/programming skills trying to make shit for Minecraft (and Roblox before that.)

Granted I also might be a bad example because I ended up working in IT, have written software to some capacity since I was 12, collect vintage machines, and keep a server rack as a pet. Furthermore, the vast majority of my daily computing happens within a collection of virtual machines running Debian.

Personally my solution to the problem was building a Linux Mint machine for my niece and her stepbrothers. Took them a bit to figure things out, but it seems to be going well.

Also bonus ageing juice for all you geezers out there:

Gen-z will technically be entering its thirties soon :P

Had to do some bullshit ai training for work. Tried to get the thing to remake cmatrix in python.

Yeah no, that’s not replacing us anytime soon, lmao.

They still exist and they’re just as unheard of as the unsung heroes who brought us the digital revolution of the 20th century.

Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Gary Kildall, the list goes on. At least Torvalds and Stallman got some recognition for what they did within their respective communities, even if the latter is a bit of a creep.

All of those people where far more important to computing, and far less famous. Just like how no one really thinks about the developers holding up the open source projects which function as the bedrock of our modern society. They’re more interested in company heads than actual technologists, or more accurate, that’s what the people in power are more interested in.

Actual engineers tend to have pesky things like morals and ethics.

If you’re running a multimillion dollar drug operation and you’re too incompetent to set up, or too cheap to pay someone to do in your place what most home-labbers could with a couple hundred bucks of hardware, then you’re going to get caught and you probably deserve it.

Realistically xmpp over i2p or tor on a disposable live-booting OS would be the best answer. Shit even a one-time-use pay-as-you-go gas station burner woulda been better in most cases. Failing that, you should at least plant yourself in a corrupt enough country and just pay off the local law-enforcement.

If you can’t do opsec and own your own comms, then why the fuck would you break international law like that?

Yes and no, if you have large-scale projects that require a ton of people, donations can be necessary.

Just because you take donations doesn’t mean you have a profit motive.

Just use graphene and matrix, fucking dipshits.

Id probably be angrier if this was some company making econoboxes, but if enshitification wants to target the cars of the rich, fuckin’ go for it.

Easy and cheap access to anonymous, private, libre, and freedom-respecting computing is the inaliable human right of all hackers and future hackers.

I shouldn’t even need an email to sign up, why do you think I’m here?

Is it really any worse than Gen X’s symbol of youthful rebellion being a cable TV channel owned and operated by Viacom so they can advertise music that’s been packaged up by the big three labels?

I’d feel kinda happy about that if it happened after what they did to pebble, if it wherent for the fact that the assholes who fucked that up still got their money, and now even more people would have wrist-mounted bricks.

Have you guys started the new season of oww my balls?

Also processing time, especially on weaker hardware or with bigger files.

That would unfortunately require me to edit GPO I have non control over. I could temporarily knock it out with regedit but I don’t know if it’d be tossed next gpupdate, I’d have to check.

Yeah I suppose that would get in the way.