Interesting observations, thanks.

I also am a fan of Michael Swanwick.

Run only open source stack you can build yourself and self-host if it comes to the worst.

It’s the weather, probably. Something for the natives, and Finns maybe.

The one in Florida certainly sucks.

You should switch to opnsense, not pfsense.

You can self-host on cheap cloud hosts like https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud/ in .de and .fi for less than electricity costs of a small computer that’s on 24/7. You can of course also buy a refurbished Lenovo tiny PC which is very quiet and is about the size of a paperback.

Living in Russia in Moscow/Petersburg is actually really nice these days.

Use a tablet with a MiFi router. The hostile network starts there.

Control of dissent, rather.

It takes lawful intercept by ISP out of the loop and the egress point should be in a minimally cooperative jurisdiction. You know the endpoint is known good since you’re the admin and the IP is not in a known VPN exit blocklist. Of course economically it makes sense to share tunnels with family and friends.

When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.

Give them a lollipop, then.

You can always just route your traffic through a roll your own tunnel to some cheap cloud VM. Modern automation makes it even painless.

“…in another world” is missing.