Comcast is promoting WiFi-based motion detection as a part of its new Xfinity Shield home protection platform, allowing routers and wireless devices to detect people moving through a home without cameras or motion sensors. […]
Don’t worry, they’re monitoring regardless of you using the service.
- Get a wifi router and install OpenWRT on it
- Put your xfinity router at http://10.0.0.1/ into bridge mode plug in your OpenWRT
- Let xfinity fuck itself, you just get a data pipe not spying
You can also buy your own modem to further reduce the dependence on xfinity.
Someone correct me if Arris has been up to shady shit over the past 6 years
Any modem needs the latest DOCSIS which is ostensibly a standard but in practice is a big opaque proprietary blob afacit more or less shared among telecoms that adhere to the “standard”. Using an older DOCSIS or one without the Comcast’s latest-greatest enhancements (hence the quotes around “standard”) will absolutely sacrifice line quality.
Moreover Comcast gives you their latest-best modem for negotiation with their upstream WAN and replaces it when it ages out or gets recalled. With bridge mode enabled, it’s as close to a dumb pipe as you’re going to get without sacrificing quality.
I would much rather make that sacrifice than trust Comcast everyday of the week. Not disputing you at all but I don’t trust a thing about that company an never will
Edit: and I should add, I haven’t personally noticed any difference in quality
You are trusting them either way. If it is your router to their modem, or your modem to their local relays, either way they can view all the traffic you put across the line.
AT&T doesn’t really leave me a choice, I have to use their stupid router/modem, but of course that’s treated as a dumb gateway for my own router. I’ve turned off their wifi radios and enabled their equivalent to gateway mode. It’s pretty much the best you can do beside put it in a faraday cage.
The notable step ups you can do is DNS over HTTPS, or full VPN tunneling, although I always assume most the VPN providers are doing the same spying, not to mention the performance hit.
I was just considering this to make pihole installation a bit cleaner. Any good wifi routers to try and get?
I use ASUS RT-AX3000. Been solid.
And yes, makes PiHole very simple. In part because so many guides assume you are running WRTG 😎
Time to wrap the modem in foil
EDIT: it takes way more foil than you’d think to block the ssids from being seen. Make sure to get the top and bottom of the device as well.
I saw this one coming
