Chatting about hypotheticals with @Zoë O'Connell
So you have a service like Tailscale. Could actually be Tailscale.
You can install it on a barebones Linux SBC with Wifi. (Raspberry Pi zero W or equivalent). These things will run off a public USB port or a USB power pack for many hours.
Set it down somewhere with public wifi. Set it as an exit node. Go elsewhere.
Some hours later, do bit torrent, or whatever.
Some days later, if you are so minded, go back and collect it. Or not. These things can be cheap enough to be disposable.
It's traceable via Tailscale, were someone to do forensics on it, but you could set it up to wipe its Tailscale installation after a certain time period if you were paranoid. It probably wouldn't ever get that far.
Hell, in a lot of places with public wifi, cable tie a random box in place and people will assume it's part of the scenery for a very long time. Your only issue is power, and there are ways to address that.
You could easily make one that looked like, and functioned as, a USB mains power adaptor.
Random VPN exit nodes, everywhere. Just need a way of getting wifi credentials onto it.
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in reply to Sarah Brown • • •A lot of wifis want you to log in via a website, so the work around for that is that you can record a lynx session and play it back, which is essentially automating a headless interaction with a website. Then put that a cron job.
I've done this in real life to keep a raspi authenticated on a pub wifi. It worked for several days.
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