Pleasant thing about routers that is is so simple to build one after learning basics of networking and pretty much any OS or distro can act as one. There are obvious choices like OPN\PFSENSE, OpenWRT, DD-WRT, FreshTomato, but literally any PC with a single Ethernet port can act as one. My favorite setup was a laptop running Ubuntu and the whole router setup was in a single netplan file + dnsmasq for DHCP.
Edit: And ofc best cheap device imo is OrangePI R1 LTS and a whatever usb wifi dongle. Came in clutch a few times, such a nice little device.
Been using DD-WRT for years. Current setup is a $50 Dell Optiplex i5 from ebay running x86 DD-WRT. I put an intel 4x 1Gbit NIC in it, and it's been an excellent router for years.
it's mostly OmniOS/SmartOS and other Illumos (descendant of OpenSolaris) distributions. All the Solaris 11 deployments i was aware of in mid-late 2010s are now either migrated to some sort of container setup of running on OmniOS.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
I would say they are trying to block every public VPN, and if some VPN tried to hide behind CloudFlare's backs thinking that they took all CloudFlare sites as hostages, then whole CloudFlare is nuked, and hostages did not save VPN from blocking.
That's called "Apple price ladder". Basically pushing consumer in small increments up the range of products with " but with just $$amount you can get X product with 2*Y of Z!" until consumer hits their limit instead of buying the cheapest working option.
Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.
For me smoking was always a social thing, smoke breaks were spent with my schoolmates, friends and colleagues. It was a nice ritual to have. Go out, walk to a smoking spot, chat, smoke one, chat, maybe two, head back, get back to work. This aspect made quitting easier, in a way. Once at work i switched from a tightly knit team that was spending every moment of the day together, to a different smaller team where everyone had their own track and there was no such esprit de corps, and no one was smoking. My breaks became much less enjoyable.
I got frustrated with myself hanging onto a habit like that. I quit cold turkey from half a pack a day because i felt like tapering down was just an excuse to continue smoking while still doing "something" about my addiction. I had weird nightmares for a few weeks, that i do not remember that well but i remember that the main theme was the embarrassment of finding myself smoking again.
It was 9 years since my last cigarette and i still think about smoking daily. I understand that mainly it is not the tobacco that i am missing, but the fun that i had and people i had around me.
Edit: And ofc best cheap device imo is OrangePI R1 LTS and a whatever usb wifi dongle. Came in clutch a few times, such a nice little device.
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