| "And I can use it only at home." In other words you can use it only on a network you control. In other words, at home you can use your own router; you can set the gateway as a computer that you control. Correct? What if you had a portable gateway, one that could travel with you? We now have Apple devices, Google/Android devices, Microsoft devices, and the majority of apps all phoning home. It is routine. No one cares. Right. We may not be able to run the latest device purchased from major retail sources using open source, user-installed OS (UNIX). But what we can do with UNIX is build our own routers from inexpensive hardware, including older hardware, and use these as our gateways. To do this, no one needs Apple, Google or Microsoft's assistance. We have what we need. It is easy to do at home, but what I would like to see is more travel-sized routers which can be driven by user chosen and user installed bootloader and user chosen UNIX-like kernel. The aim with these efforts is control, not impressive hardware specs. Proprietary hardware and locked bootloaders will always have the most impressive hardware specs on their side. But to get those things, the user has to sacrafice some control. |
Yes.
> What if you had a portable gateway, one that could travel with you?
I can rent a VPS and connect through it using "Always-on VPN" option (I did it once and it worked). But then I have to pay for a server monthly in addition to the mobile plan. It is not that expensive but I would prefer just having access to iptables and being able to install my firewall on a phone.
I might be wrong but on Windows you can at least install a firewall. At least you could on earlier versions.