WPA and WPA2 gear still has plenty of vulnerabilities.

WiFi 6 has made this a lot more viable than it used to be. I’ve done a fair amount of parking lot leeching and new gear is worth it.

Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.

Pirating wifi doesn’t preclude any of this. See also the GL.iNet devices, such as the GL-MT3000.

Currently in a holding pattern because, while I got RAM & SSD for a new-to-me “1-liter” server before tariffs hit, I don’t have the server itself nor any money to buy one, despite looking for 9th or 10th gen Intel which will cost me only $120 to $150 barebones.

Money to buy one is not coming in because the place where I live has nonstop noise & activity and I don’t have a separate room or any door I can close, which severely limits my ability to work as I have auditory hypersensitivity and an absolute need for solitude in order to recharge enough to think. 🤷🏻

Are you 14?

One can also mine Monero on normal everyday computers.

If for some reason you don’t like the look of NUT, and you get an APC UPS (and maybe some others?), there is always apcupsd. It will run shell scripts upon certain events, etc. Old, simple, works.

I’ve lived in areas where Comcast stayed up during long outages and areas where it didn’t. Not sure about FTTN, but I don’t think consumer broadband services are required to stay up during an outage like copper phone service is.

Take a look at the “AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 4 Bay Nas Mini PC”

N100 ain’t it.

Maybe i3-N305… or a mini PC with AMD H-series chip (or similar) configured TDP-down if you are concerned about power usage or fan noise.

Not sure if Wireguard over obfs4proxy is doable easily on OpenWRT yet, but it may be an option

Very easy to find good deals (and parts) on these 1L business PCs!

Testing an image post from Voyager client…

I only own the gear marked A and B, which lives above the couch I call home.

A is my web services 24/7 Proxmox box, an Intel 8500T; 2 routers; an 8TB HDD; and a Back-UPS Pro so old its ethernet surge protection is rated for 100bT, with a brand new LFP battery in it. The UPS powers both A and B.

B is my personal Proxmox box, an AMD 5750GE, which I use for development and running desktop OSes which I remote into, plus a GL.iNet Slate AX router. These come with me if I stay someplace other than the couch (not pictured). That’s why they’re on different shelves. Also, there’s a USB wifi dongle w/antenna connected to B which I used when some stupid website demands I drop my VPN (all traffic from everything pictured is routed thru 24/7 private VPN endpoints, aka a $2/mo VPS or three).

Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.

Go with “1-liter” aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don’t have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)