i'm really glad that i can use my own modem.
In germany every ISP is by law required to accept self brought modems.
They can't force you to use their often shitty hardware.
My current modem/router is up for 3 months without a single interruption to my connection.
Can the ISP load firmware onto your modem? I'm on Cox in the US (same ISP as in TFA) and you can bring your own modem, but Cox will remotely update the firmware.
No, they can't. They don't have any access at all to your device.
But as jeduardo already said, you can fetch updates from the device manufacturer.
The mentioned Fritz!Box from AVM has automatic updates and is known for delivering them for a really long time. My 12 year old repeater from that brand is still receiving security updates from time to time.
Not really as far as I know. Providers in Germany have more or less standardized on Fritz!Box from AVM and the router comes with the admin password available. Updates are then fetched from upstream AVM.
But the key point here is device independence - by law, providers need to give you all information required to establish a connection to them. This allows you to run a Linux or BSD box as a router should you wish to. It somehow makes up for the slow broadband speeds you can get.
Are there Linux or BSD boxes with ADSL or DOCSIS physical layers present? I use a separate modem and router, as do most people in the US that are not renting equipment from their ISP.
I've noticed it gets quite murky when dealing with fibre-to-the-premises, particularly in the UK. Although I don't think an ISP would disallow BYOD, I imagine they'd just not be as likely to support it.
I recently moved ISP, partly because of cost, but also because they offered a great home router as part of their bundle. The installer could not utilise any of the existing wiring in my house, had to be all drilled a second time...
Conversely, my last ISP used some awful Nokia modem that barely supported any kind of routing or customisation and I picked them specifically because it was a rental and the fibre wiring had already been done.
It's fairly common for ISP's in Australia to also give you a choice of BYOD or buying one of theirs. Usually you pay outright for the modem, however, so its yours to keep. That said, this is changing with the national fibre roll-out. But with ADSL being the de-facto choice, BYOD makes sense.
> I've noticed it gets quite murky when dealing with fibre-to-the-premises, particularly in the UK. Although I don't think an ISP would disallow BYOD, I imagine they'd just not be as likely to support it.
In France, I've noticed that some ISPs (Free for FTTH and SFR for FTTC + cable attached to the router) they'll offer the possibility of configuring the provided router in "bridge" mode, where you basically get the external IP to whichever equipment is hooked up to their router.
I've also had FTTH with SFR, which have a separate device which terminates the optical connection (ONT) and speaks ethernet with the main router. I don't remember if the main router was able to work in bridge mode. It was possible to connect your own router to the ONT but you had to jump through hoops [0] to actually receive a working DHCP response.
Bouygues also had the separate device for terminating the optical connection, connected via ethernet to the main router. The only catch was that it talked over vlan 100 for some reason, but other than that it was smooth sailing.
I've never had Orange, but I hear it's a pain to replace the actual router with them.
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[0] IIRC you had to send some custom DHCP options pretending more or less to be an actual SFR router.
BYOD is really easy here with DSL. With fibre they try to push the legal limits by arguing that their device is required because its part of their network.
But because the law explicitly says the network has to end at a passive point, they got fined. If they don't provide the login and vlan id's, you can just report them to the authorities and they will handle it.
I've got FTTP in the UK (from Andrew's and Arnold). There's a provided bridge which takes the fibre connection and relays PPPoE to my own router. I believe that's a common way to do it.
I use the ISP's modem (separating my own choices from having to worry about upgrades to DOCSIS and the like), but then hang my own router off of it. For that matter I have multiple routers inside the cable router for various tiers. With secure DNS and almost universal TLS, and then the firewall that are the internal private networks, the threat profile is negligible.
FWIW, you can use your own modem and router with Cox internet, but most people don't because the provided modem is free and most people don't care to spend money on their own.
Also, at least the last time I checked, the Google Maps API was exorbitantly expensive. Niantic would likely get a discount, but avoiding this exploit doesn’t override all of the other benefits of OSM.
IIRC many of the original employees were ex-Googlers and the original Ingress game did use Google Maps data so at some level they were able to get what they need. I think there were rumours about them using undocumented abilities too in the early days, but my memory is fuzzy at this point. They moved to OSM later.
I can't really confirm this data - atleast for my city it is very low. I started working fulltime last year and i'm already in the median and will crack the top 25% when 30 years old in some years. And my employee is not known to pay well.
There will always be 0 days out there, but they will always be very expensive and rare.
If you have the ressources to buy or find a 0-day, you definetly won't blow it by executing known malware, or other stuff, which falls under the detected by AV's.
I really don't thing that having AV installed will protect any user from a 0-day.
On the other side, you install a very invasive av software, which runs as privileged user and intercepts everything thats happening on your system. They even make a great target for malware by themself. Just recently ClamAV had a bug in it's file scanner, which let to an rce:
CVE-2023-20032
> This is sad :( hetzner charges extra for ipv4 address, and this means I couldn't run `git clone` without paying extra
Well, they added the Option, so you can get your server for less then normal. The Servers are cheaper, if you Opt-Out of IPv4. I really liked that move.
It's not 100% renewable in the Mix. Thats not what he said. It just means, that he picked a supplier, which exclusively buys renewable energy on the energy market.
Obviously it's still the same energy mix, which arrives on your house. But your money won't support Coal Power Plants.
We have a selfhosted Forum based on WoltLab for our Community.
It's a (one time) Paid Forum-Software (110$), which is based on PHP and easy extendable.
Right now we're having 141k Members and 120k Posts in 5 Years, so i would say our Forum is quite active.
There is no App, but the Design is really good, fully responsible and can be used on a Phone without a problem.
Anti-Cheat on the Account-Level is meaningless. You ban a cheater? Who cares. He will back with a new Account some Minutes later. Hardware Bans are useless aswell, as they can easily be spoofed.
The only effective strategy for Anti-Cheat is a Universal Identity Provider, which can proof you are a real Human with no Cheat Record.
I'm talking about steam accounts. There are many cheaters our there, who just dont care if they lose an account. They will cheat on an alternative Account and when they get banned, they will buy a new one. They dont even care spending some bucks on the Game again.
Edit: Take Rust as an example. A year ago, the Developers made some stats public: 12 Million copies sold, 600.000 Banned Accounts. Thats 5% of all sold Accounts.
There is even a Twitter Feed, showing all the Bans:https://twitter.com/rusthackreport
Most of the Accounts will show a Playtime of under 30 hours in the Game, mostly no Friends or other games, indicating they were only made for cheating.
I'm amazed at how much money some people have to burn on new accounts. Looking at minecraft servers, there are so ridiculously many people banned.
I've wondered if there's some sort of economy here, i.e. someone with a ton of stolen accounts monetizing them by offering to cheat all day on your competitor's server.
Oh yes, absolutely. There are a number of "alt shops" selling Minecraft accounts accounts for a few cents each.
Most of these accounts have security questions set, so you can't change the email and truly "take ownership" of the account, but it's good enough for cheating on servers.
Some shops even have an API for generating accounts or tokens, so your hack client can have a feature where you get a new account right from your game. Get banned, reconnect in a few seconds.
Currently it's even worse in France. At the moment, there are 17 of 56 reactors turned off, due to safety concerns. There is even the possibility of major outages when a cold wave hits the country.
