Comment by cliffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cliffy | Hacker News Reader

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You can replace their router with one of your own. On my ONT there are two ways of connecting to the Verizon service:

1) Ethernet. If you connect this way then running your own router is trivial, but by using Ethernet you lose some services related to TV.

2) Coax. This is a bit more complicated. You'll still have to power the Verizon router, but everything behind, and including, your router still will be under your control. You need a Coax to Ethernet adapter like this one:

http://www.netgear.com/service-provider/products/powerline-a...

I don't remember all the specific steps I had to take to enable this offhand. I need to go back and write a howto. In any case, The final setup will look like this:

  Verizon ONT --[Coax]--> Moca Adapter --[Ethernet]--> Your router.
                          Moca Adapter --[Coax]--> Verizon router.

One important point is that you must release your DHCP IP on the Verizon router before your router can obtain one.

I think you can dispense with the Coax connection to the Verizon router if you don't care about TV capabilities, but if you don't you might as well switch the ONT to use Ethernet instead and avoid this mess.

My main motivation for doing this was that the wireless capabilities of the Verizon-supplied router were terrible, but it has the added bonus of keeping Verizon's prying eyes out of my home network.

Yeah, I've taken a similar approach - my comments were more just to raise awareness about how much verizon is theoretically able to do in light of what a low bar they have for doing them for LEO.

You can get it set up so all your iptv services work with the ONT using the ethernet port BTW - that is the default install configuration these days for people on the faster service tiers as moca caps some where north of 100mb. In that setup the actiontec is connected both via coax and ethernet to the ont, and it serves as a ethernet<-> moca bridge internally to support the ip features of the stbs.

Running the STB's without any moca is basically unusable, no epg, no dvr, no vod etc. And it's worth noting that even though my actiontec is physically separated from my home net through a tweaky setup, they could still theoretically do full stream wireless packet capturing of whatever the radio could hear, or become an active node on your other 802.11 network. Brute forcing a WPA2 secret is a common enough practice that they have purpose built luggable SFF pc's with 4 tesla cards inside for field work.

You can actually remove 100% of the verizon CPE and still good tv if you're willing to pay for it. Once I found out all the stuff the STB's are doing I'm in the process of replacing them with a tivo with a cable card and a tivo mini (basically a slave). Even slightly cheaper per month than the multiroom dvr, though the upfront is $$$

Could you give an example of the WPA intercept system you speak of (SFF / Tesla)?

There are some interesting things on the Harris site, but seemingly no open source info on such systems they may have.

I think I was abusing terms when I said SFF, I guess I was thinking more like "in comparison to" an HPC rack.

similar to the intermediate CA black box providers they seem to have much larger presences at trade shows than on the web, but this is pretty close to what I'm talking about:

https://www.nor-tech.com/clusters/cs-darpa.htm

but this is a little closer to the look: http://www.captec-group.com/wp-content/uploads/captec_dsei_2...

But the one I was thinking of was more along the line of a comically oversized air travel case for a projector or so.

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