>unsourced information about an inflammatory topic shared in a humor community

I trust this graph with every fiber of my being (/s)

I have it on all my home networking equipment, my router and my APs, and a wifi bridge for my SBCs. My experience has been that it is just as simple as the proprietary firmware, and more robust. The catch is that I chose each piece of equipment knowing that I would flash custom firmware onto it, so they were ones the OWRT wiki showed as being simple to flash.

Which model TP-Link are you going with? The page for whichever model on the OpenWRT wiki should tell you whether it’s easy or difficult to flash and revert

they benefit people who only don’t want their network-provider watching, but don’t care who else may be.

Proxies and VPNs seem like the most obvious targets. They mostly prey on people who don’t understand the technical workings thereof (had my mom ask if she needed to get a VPN bc firefox opened on ad for theirs, claiming it enhanced privacy), and serve little benefit to people who are doing the kind of illegal activities that make governments take notice. They serve as a single point of compromise for anyone, and they work worldwide so that all your traffic can be monitored even when you’re on a different ISP/in a different country. It’s like the perfect MITM, and people are even willing to pay to have themselves monitored.

The truth is that at best they benefit people who only don’t want their network-provider watching, but don’t care who else may be. It’s the perfect setup for a 3-letter agency to just sit and monitor everything anyone does, waiting for someone who’s just a little too careless to access illegal content thinking they’re anonymous.