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Comment by lmns | Hacker News Reader

Moto E, G, etc.. Almost as cheap as chinese brands, but with much better update / software support.

I have Moto G. Software updates are fairly regular, but I still switched to Cyanogenmod. I'd say there isn't much difference between CM and stock android. You can tether with CM without worrying about telco tethering blocks, something that doesn't work on stock android

"You can tether with CM without worrying about telco tethering blocks, something that doesn't work on stock android"

Doesn't that depend on your carrier? IIRC some carriers detect tethering by looking for packets with different TTL values (which would represent different devices' defaults, or indicate an extra decrement as the packet went through the phone), or inspecting HTTP User-Agent.

potentially, but stock Android tells the carrier it's tethering, and there's no way around it. CM doesn't. http://danielpocock.com/android-betrays-tethering-data

You can hack around both TTL values and user-agent btw. Deep packet inspection, maybe less so

I was unable to replicate his results on my Nexus 5 running AOSP. This behavior has possibly changed in newer versions of Android.

Also, DPI can be trivially bypassed by running all traffic from your phone through a VPN. All traffic, tethered or not, will be indistinguishable to your carrier.

On my Android Moto G, running Android 4, I could not get around my carriers (Three UK) tethering block. CM solved that.

VPN would work for DPI true, hassle though.

Are you running the 'stock' Google-provided ROM, did you try an actual fresh installation? I'm running a clean AOSP ROM, without any kind of CM customizations.

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