I will never understand people who do illegal things over their own IP. Is it really that hard to find an open access point? Way back in the day when I torrented all my content I used a long-range wifi antenna connected to a public AP and a dedicated PC with a scrubbed drive that never connected to my home network.
> Also- the secret about torrents is that nobody really gives a shit.
That’s not true in some places like Germany. Just a few seconds of uploading a somewhat popular movie or porn without a VPN will get you a C&D + fees letter.
Yeah, because it's lawyers working for the rightholders sending them, not ISPs. You can sometimes get out, but only by replying properly, ignoring then will end in court.
Can confirm. I slipped up for a few seconds once while torrenting. My cease-and-desist letter from Sony was personally delivered to my door by the Hausmeister.
>According to the complaint against him, Al-Azhari allegedly visited a dark web site that hosts “unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS” multiple times on May 14, 2019.
This is cherry-picked out of a larger case because we care that they know any information about what they did via Tor. I don't think he's specifically been arrested for visiting a website even one like an ISIS propaganda one.
The long-range wifi antenna has always sounded like an opsec urban legend to me. You'll be able to transmit signals to the router, but can you really receive them with any sufficient fidelity if the router itself does not also have a long range antenna or unusually high transmission power?
Disclaimer: I'm a total noob at anything radio or electronics (and would appreciate an education on this topic from someone who isn't!)
> A 10dbi gain yagi boosts your transmitted and received signal equally
I don't see how this can be true, as long as you're not arguing semantics and actually want to use the wifi. Wouldn't you need two identical routers outfitted with high gain directional antennas pointing at each other? That's easy to do when you control both of them, but the subject under discussion is connecting to public wifi of a router you do not control.
Surely a big antenna pointing directly at a router with a tiny antenna will send signals with more clarity than it receives them. The tiny antenna is broadcasting a weak signal in all directions, and the big antenna is transmitting a strong signal in one direction.
I believe that the big antenna could "pick up" some parts of the radio waves from the router, but wouldn't most environments be too noisy for your receiver to find any useful signal? By the time the already weak radio wave gets to your antenna, it's dissipated so much that you couldn't possibly read enough of it to put a meaningful signal back together, right?
using such setup wouldn't prevent anyone from finding you if you did illegal things that really mattered, like donating to a terrorist organization
you can proudly use it to download torrents (because nobody cares and the feds won't triangulate a signal for torrents), but they can definitely do it for terrorism and intelligence matters.
(check out all the stories of spies who had radios, from the 1914 to SOE to cold war)
As a bonus, you even post your story on HN, a site where analysts from all the governments and major companies of the planet meet to talk about tech...
McDonald's has video cameras pointing at every inch of their property 24/7. All they need is a timestamp from the AP and they'll go find your license plate in the parking lot on the surveillance tapes.
What kind of idiot drives a car with a valid personal license plate while committing crime?
I don't even drive a car when I'm selling shit on craigslist for fear they'll look up the plate and do dumb shit when they're mad the drill I sold them has normal battery life.
Most criminals (they're risk takers) don't really think these things out and a large percentage of them get away all the time. Stuff goes wrong, footage goes missing, cameras don't work, prosecution bungles some rules, etc.
