My own private MOBILE WiFi
Introduction
Recently I have been getting back into digital minimalism and I really
like the idea of becoming a digital nomad.
I.E being able to go anywhere with my tech and having it all work as
expected. I just pick up my bag with my laptop, CD walkman, dumb phone,
etc and walk around knowing I can do anything I need to digitally.
Just one problem remained and that is WiFi. I dont want to rely on
insecure free WiFI networks which also limit where I can go. I want to
have a mobile WiFi network which goes where I go.
4G
The obvious solution to my problem was just use the 4G from my
smartphone and share it across my devices. I did do this for a bit but
it was a bit annoying still being tied down to my smartphone.
At that point why even bother with all this extra shit? Just do
everything on the smartphone, exactly the thing I want to avoid.
Thankfully 4G (and 5G) mobile routers exist. The 5G ones I will look at
in the future as they are quite expensive right now, but 4G mobile
routers can be picked up for cheap, I got mine for £30 in Currys PC
World.
My Device
I ended up buying a
Mercusys MT110
from Currys PC World for £30. And so far so good.
The setup was a little awkward because I didnt realise the sim card had
to be inserted all the way down, and that took me way too long to figure
out.
The device worked for me out of the box with a VOXI sim card that I pay
£10 per month for 45GB of data. There is a nice web interface located at
192.168.1.1 which helps configure the device.
I am getting about 1mps download speeds, which may not sound like a lot
but for me this is brilliant. On my home broadband I get about 100kbs
if I am lucky.
So I am getting great speeds and paying virtually nothing whilst also
being able to be mobile and not use a smart phone. Absolute win!
Tor
So since I am using VOXI (Vodafone), they want me to upload my ID to
their website in order to go on websites that are deemed "adult only".
I am not doing this. I know they already have my bank details, but I am
not giving up anymore information to them.
Now before you assume that I am just trying to goon, websites deemed
"adult only" are a bit of a weird area. 4chan for example is deemed
"adult only" and I regularly check /g/ for the memes.
I am not uploading my ID just to check /g/
A solution around this is to route certain browser traffic through Tor.
In Arctic-fox (Firefox 5) you can do this by looking in the network
settings for proxys. The same applies in standard Firefox and variants.
Select Manual proxy configuration
and set the SOCKS host field to be
127.0.0.1 with the port number being 9050.
There should also be a field that says "No proxy for" add the domains
you do not want to route through Tor as some websites dont work as
intended or at all (Discogs).
Right now I have the following in this field:
localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.1.1, .com, .co.uk
I will update the whitelist as I go along.
Now you should be able to access all the "adults only" websites without
getting a Vodafone "GIVE US ALL YOUR DATA 🖐😲" warning.
Oh yeah make sure that Tor is running as a daemon on your system.
Privacy Theory
All of this got me thinking. Would it be possible to have a nearly 100%
anonymous internet connection from ISP - websites?
At least in United Kingdom, most phone providers do not need any ID or
even bank details to be used. I can go and buy a Vodafone sim card for
99p in cash, buy a mobile router in cash, and buy a £40 top up in cash,
apply it to the sim card via text and then have unlimited data on my
router.
Combine this with other privacy tools / privacy enhancing tools such as
Tor, Libreboot, Linux, *BSD and surely you have a near 100% private
internet connection, with no one in the chain knowing who you are.
If anyone has any disputes to my theory please email me, but on paper
it sounds like it could work for the ultra paranoid. For me I cucked
out and I have a Vodafone account which is tied to my bank, but the if
I ever need privacy, I know what to do, right?