My wife has done some work with child exploitation organizations around this exact problem. Sadly, this is not a surprise at all. I’d venture that maybe 5% of the posts they report are removed, and the offending accounts are essentially never punished.
To make matters worse, given that pedophilia and child porn is now tied up with QAnon, some of her peers have started to have their accounts banned when they report this stuff, as apparently they’re being caught up in an anti-conspiracy filter.
And yet Linksys (and others) still sell their closed routers as well. One can only concluded that the Open Source support, while important for a niche group, is not enough for market dominance...
I bought one of these (WRT1900ACS) when I was working from home last year. It's good, but not great. Before anyone else buys one of these for their open source "support," you should know that Linksys/Marvell basically threw a buggy open source WiFi driver over the wall, failed to upstream it to the Linux kernel due to issues with the code, and abandoned it.
I have one and it works great for me. I'm not a heavy wifi user, mostly I want openwrt.
I've had several openwrt routers. Before this one I had a tp-link wdr4300, then an archer c7. The wrt1900acs has pretty fast, full-featured hardware.
I run firewall + adblock + privoxy + vlans. Because it has a USB port, I've added a USB GPS dongle so it does gps-based ntp time.
At first openwrt was a little daunting, but it has really grown on me.
One great thing about it is that the entire linux distribution is basically read-only, and all changes you make to your machine are in an infrequently-written overlay filesystem. If you back up /overlay/upper you will have all your config changes in a small tarball. All operations that do continuous writing like logfiles go to ramdisk, so it's easy on the flash and reliable during power failure.
Another thing is that if you follow the instructions, it's actually pretty straightforward to build openwrt for your specific configuration. I cut out the package manager and compiled everything I wanted into my image (or out of it, I turned off ipv6)
With a simple setup, you don't even have to bother with the gui. The config files are pretty simple and you can edit them directly.
I've also put openwrt on some network switches and once I got vlans going, my network got a lot more manageable.
I have a vlans:
- normal - machines can route to internet
- restricted - machines boot and have local dns - can get out (updates) only through the proxy
- test vlan - can't get to anything
the network switches are mikrotik and also running openwrt.
I have retired a rb750gl and rb2011ils, and now everything runs on a rb2011uias and a rb3011uias-rm (11 port)
I love the rb3011 - the rack mount tabs can be rotated 90 degrees and you can attach it under a shelf.
The two switches have SFP, and I can't help but think I should start messing with fiber.
Linksys is owned by Cisco, and I don't know what they do now, but at the time a Cisco low-end router had no specialty hardware to run a lot of their features. Those features were implemented in software.
So openwrt threatens their entry level and some of their mid-range devices, creating a conflict of interests.
I had a WRT1900AC for several years. It was a very nice product, with very good community support.
Official support, however, was not good in my experience. Several years later I finally bought a Ubiqui Dream Machine Pro, and absolutely love it. Kinda miffed that they suffered a breach a month after I bought it, though.
I recently sold my UDMP and bought some mikrotik gear, because the device hat very tight limits on what ubiquiti wants you to do with it. No wireguard was an annoyance I could live with, but disabling NAT was not possible and a switch backplane running at 1gbps were the final blow. Also I do not want to have to log into an online account to use my (maybe airgapped) router.
The older Unifi routers, USG-3 and USGPRO-4, can run wireguard. The annoyance is, that you must configure it via config.gateway.json file and reinstall it after each firmware update. They also run without cloud accounts.
Pity that Ubiquiti goes the wrong direction with their newer products.
Mikrotik's wired hardware is fantastic...but their wireless products leave a lot to be desired. I find that in most cases openwrt gives better wireless throughput on the exact same hardware under the same conditions. My other gripe with Mikrotik is that they pushed their own proprietary protocols like EoIP instead of supporting standards like vxlan (I know this will be available in RouterOS 7, but that is still not really out when I last checked).
My knowledge of their product line is pretty out of date now, but in another life I spent a few years setting up networks in hotels and condo buildings with Mikrotik gear.
Their software has the occasional wart if you're more used to enterprise gear like Cisco, but is generally decent and reliable. (The kinds of issues I'm talking about are like... it was really roundabout and difficult to get a single port with both VLAN tagged as well as untagged traffic flowing through it.)
I'm honestly always surprised their equipment isn't more well-known and popular in the tech crowd. While they've got some turnkey stuff, they also sell (or at least sold) devices that were pretty simply a handful of ethernet ports, a switch chip + CPU, and a mini-pcie port that you could add kinda whatever you wanted in to (they sell modules for 802.11, 3G/LTE, LoRA, etc). For a lot of models they'll also just sell you a bare board. Basically everything comes with a full software license (only real limit is max 200 vpn tunnels, max 200 hotspot users). They sell replacement parts down to bare boards to replace PSUs and things. Basically everything is powerable over PoE, most stuff has a SFP port, etc. Some of the models have had GPIO pins, and on basically all of them all the LEDs can be reprogrammed and are user-controllable. They've got equipment as cheap as $40. A lot of it is actually supported by OpenWRT.
Without having used it, if you just want something with wifi and more similar to a consumer router, looks like their hAP AC3 for $99 or something is probably decent. You're not losing anything buying the home gear, it's still licensed to the same level as all the other gear. Otherwise if you just need a router you can basically just start at the cheap end of their routers and look through the test results for something with acceptable performance for you.
Personally, I've been using a RB2011 for almost a decade as either a router or core switch and it's been great. Though the highest my connection speed's been throughout is probably 100mbps. These day's it's relegated to switching, and handles my setup where I've got all my PoE IP cams on one VLAN, main network on another, trunk running to my server where I've got the DVR and all my other stuff running, etc, etc. Hasn't had a single hiccup.
The hAP AC2 is almost essentially the same router and even cheaper. I replaced my UDM with it and I am way happier without the extra frills (no LED, no boot sound) and my uptime has been way more reliable
I use the RB4011, which even came with rack mounts. For the last year it's been working great (once you get the hang of how the configuration works). Can highly recommend.
I also use the CRS326, with a little less power than the RB4011, but with 24 Lan ports instead.
The only downside, compared to the UDMP, is the missing DPI
Me to, I’m considering a UDM-Pro for my 10Gbps internet upgrade coming soon but I’m a bit afraid that it won’t play nice with multiple external IP-addresses.
Microtik is certainly interesting but I’m lost as to which model I should choose.
I’ve dithered on the UDM-P, the reviews are very mixed.
I’m in a strange place with UniFi as a whole, as my APs are limiting download speeds to about 275mbps while upload speed is line speed, as is wired speed. There is lots on forums and Reddit about strange issues like this with Ubiquiti and they could really do with some firming up of their software.
Ubiquiti hardware is an great but their software has some of the worst QA I've seen in my life, the forum is basically an continuously ignored issue tracker where I've found dozens of problems I'm having with no solutions (about 200 aps and 150 switches/routers). Ubiquiti software is absolutely abysmal.
I would expect an AC3200 router to be more expensive than a WRT54GL (which is $40 today). More capable hardware with a more expensive BOM will come at a higher price.
At the same time similar hardware tends to get cheaper over time and the WRT54GL hasn't really ever experienced a price drop - I'd be a bit more ready to attribute the price difference to "Because they can since the market is so locked up".
> Because as far as I know, Apple only allows
NetworkExtension-based apps to be distributed via the App Store,
No, not so. Plenty of VPN apps based on network extensions are delivered outside the Mac App Store. In fact, most commercial VPNs are done this way. My company uses GlobalProtect for example, and I can install it any number of ways, and it’s been NE based for over a year now...
Finding life on another planet, even just single celled organisms, would help with the study of biogenesis, which is one of the greatest mysteries of biology.
Some exotic life form, which did not originate on earth would most likely have interesting features we have never seen before. Scientists could study them and gain insights about alternatives to the biology of earth creatures. Who knows this research may lead to new drugs or procedures we can use to better our lives?
Among others mentioned in this thread is: who knows? It's an unknown unknown
Maybe nothing. Maybe nanotechnology. Maybe information storage. Maybe photosynthesis. Maybe physics, math. It would almost certainly radically transform biology. One thing is certain: it wouldn't likely have zero effect on human understanding
I'd probably think about it occasionally and smile.
It would change our science fiction.
Children would learn about it in school from a very young age, or at home in books even younger. They'd grow up knowing Earth life isn't the only life.
Religions would slowly adapt to be more palatable to children who grew up this way, or lose favor among the next generation.
Philosophically, I think this is impossible. Even if there were discovered an omniscient, omnipotent being, there would still be question of whether it were supernatural or merely preternatural; the question of its divinity would still be subject to personal belief
Even in expensive hospital systems in the SF Bay Area, it's not every patient getting a test, much to the chagrin of some of my friends working at the ones that aren't doing universal testing.
You spend the 14 days in quarantine either way - land or air. And it's not 'government quarantine' for most people - it's just a hotel room, airbnb or wherever your approved plan says you're going to quarantine.
"As has been the case for months, all travellers will have their quarantine plans reviewed by a government official and, if not suitable, will be required to quarantine in a federal quarantine facility."[1]
Canadian citizens and permanent residents always have a right to enter. Presumably if you come to a land border without a negative test, you won't be trusted to self-quarantine properly and will be whisked off into a federal facility.
I think it's highly dependent. I came to Canada a few months back, completed the Federal and Provincial quarantine plans. All I got at immigration was a "be careful" and 2 calls from the province asking if everything was ok.
I've heard that that is generally the case. I was merely pointing out that if you show up at a border crossing without a negative test despite it being required, you likely won't be trusted to "be careful".
> Canada also instituted the negative test on arrival rule in the last week or so. The caterwauling from our airlines was just ridiculous.
The negative test requirement is only for air travel, and in spite of your assertion, there is (limited) non-trade travel allowed across the border. I'm driving across the border in a few weeks, and for some reason don't need a test that I'd need if I flew.
To make matters worse, given that pedophilia and child porn is now tied up with QAnon, some of her peers have started to have their accounts banned when they report this stuff, as apparently they’re being caught up in an anti-conspiracy filter.
Sigh...