Clusterfck

You cannot just buy any SFP module and have it work. Most ISPs deploy a “special” (at least compared to normal point to point fiber links) that lets them serve multiple customers out of one port in their office. This is called a Passive Optical Network and requires specialized modules on both ends. There are ways to make a specific SFP work as an ONT and by cloning certain identifiers from the ONT to make the ISP think their box is still there.

This is a lot of effort and from my research, could stop working randomly in some cases.

Synology was my gateway to self-hosting. I agree that now, with the knowledge I’ve gained, they are overpriced, but for a “NAS with training wheels” I can’t think of much better for people with the money to spend.

I think there’s a place for Synology and I’d like to imagine with such a resounding amount of feedback, they’re going to avoid the proprietary crap for a while at least. I’m not saying they’re a good company or that they deserve praise for backtracking on a stupid idea, but at least I’m not as reluctant to recommend them as I was.

Please, no shaking the trauma victims.

Can’t speak for granny but I heard your mom was the town bicycle.

I’m not sure if it’s crazier that statement was made or the fact that I read it and agreed with it before I even thought how crazy of a time this is.

lol this same post was on the NYC community. Robert gets around!

Edit: lmao it’s all the same guy!

Reminds me of Motherlode back in the online flash game days

Can someone prove me wrong, I thought Crucial was a big deal in consumer memory upgrades?

Yeah, by virtue of not owning the entire connection (which is impossible unless you own the ISP, intermediary providers, and the service you’re connecting to) somebody somewhere is going to see something that may be identifiable to you. There are services that are offered by many companies for huge enterprises that give you basically a direct connection to a data center and a lot of times that traffic can be totally encrypted, but it’s usually for very big enterprises and isn’t cheap to get.

And you’re definitely helping the privacy part running a VPN on the router level, but still, there’s always a chance of something getting leaked. It’s pretty low and gets better all the time, but that chance always exists. It’s the reason why air gapping is still a thing for things that ABSOLUTELY cannot be attacked/compromised/viewed by some random person.

Again, if you’re going off of a privacy stance, you’ve made things hard enough that unless a huge ISP has some kind of agreement to sell data to advertising companies and spending the time to implement services to get you and the 2 percent (which is probably a huge overestimate) of customers taking similar steps, it’s just not worth them making the effort.

For whatever it’s worth, that’s not a huge privacy violation. Most routers auto-identify devices. Most IP scan tools just identify the device by default too.

If it’s a good enough public/hotspot network, they will have “client isolation” turned on and it’ll keep you from seeing any other devices but the actual network equipment.

Some of that is built in (mostly if it’s an ONT/router combination unit). And a lot of what they can see is just because you’re sending all of your traffic through them no matter what VPN you’re running. Knowing MAC addresses is pretty much a requirement for “the internet” to work correctly and, while you can obfuscate a MAC address on some devices, there is a (small) chance that can cause problems too.

I know hearing from someone that actually works for one may not be super convincing, but if your ISP is a smaller provider than like AT&T/Spectrum/Cox, they are almost certainly not going to spy on you just because they want to. I’m a customer of the ISP I work at. If I was told tomorrow I had to turn on some kind of deep packet inspection/intercept/spying service, I’d resist it as much as possible simply because I don’t want to see that and I don’t want someone to see what I’m doing. I can only assume that other companies have similar positions on the matter.

I work for an ISP. There’s a number of ways that that they could have figured it out and probably 98 percent of them are genuinely there as a troubleshooting method and nothing more.

As another user said, if it’s a fiber connected ONT, there’s some remote management tools we can use to see what’s there. Some ONTs have a router built in as well and in some cases, we’ve actually done a site scan of WiFi networks for customers set up like you. We can see all the WiFi devices nearby and pretty quickly tell you “yeah, your speed/connectivity issues are because you have about 80 2.4ghz networks being broadcast around you.”

If they offer their own routers, someone could even do a site scan off of your neighbors routers and get an idea what’s around. If most of your other neighbors are using their own routers ISP provided router and you’re the odd one out, odds are that non-ISP device they’re seeing is you. This one is the least likely though, there’s a number of easier methods to see what’s the device is besides using other devices in neighboring houses.

Additionally, there’s a chance they did document something like “customer is using their own Asus router, not ours” and they just checked ticket/service order history. They could have got this from you telling them in the past, a technician being onsite and seeing this, or as the other comment mentioned, you’re connected to their network, they’re going to see the MAC address of the device plugged into their equipment in a few places pretty easily.