I couldn't find anything on that yet. I think that since the project is still in a rather early stage of development, it's more of a proof of concept. But I do know that the PCAPs are saved on the device, and you can download them onto another computer.
Is it necessary to get a cell plan to run the hotspot?
As far as I'm aware: no.
Cell-site simulators could theoretically only target devices that connect with a valid IMSI, but I kinda doubt that they are doing that. But you could get a cheap prepaid SIM, instead of an actual cell plan.
This is the easiest explanation I could come up with:
Your phone (or other cellular devices) constantly broadcasts a few identifiers. The IMEI, which is tied directly to the cellular hardware in your device, and the IMSI, which is tied to your SIM card. Law enforcement uses so called cell-site simulators, which basically pretend to be cellular antennas, while actually just grabbing IMEIs and IMSIs from every device in the area. This is often used during protests, in order to identify those who attend them.
Rayhunter is a piece of software that detects the presence of cell-site simulators, making attendants of protests aware of the hidden danger.
This is especially important, now that the US basically transformed into an authoritarian state. We've already seen how Trump strategically uses law enforcement to crack down on protests, such as the BLM movement in 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_a63r5Km9I) Being aware of law enforcement/intelligence operations that try to identify and track down protest attendants is more important than ever.
If they're more sophisticated, they have lists of VPN server IPs, and compare every user's IP against those lists
There's an even simpler way: Just look up the ASN of the IP's associated ISP, and block it, if it matches the ASN of a datacenter ISP
Proton VPN offers special VPN servers for streaming, they can circumvent the second type of blocking by using residential IP address ranges, but not the first one. But they generally have pretty good IP reputation (at least on their paid servers, free is a whole different story, but I don't think they even give a fuck), because they're pretty good at anti-abuse.
Something tells me that this is soon gonna disappear like a Boeing whistleblower. To everybody reading this: Make sure to archive that guide, preferably locally on your device!
I'm sorry, I have misunderstood your post then. I didn't realize you want to run Windows on the server, I thought you were just saying that you have no prior experience with Linux because you use Windows on the desktop.
As someone with some experience in both Linux and Windows system administration I can tell you, Windows on the server sucks.I'd even go as far to say that Linux on servers is more noob-friendly because there are more guides, tutorials, other resources, etc. available, and people on StackExchange, in forums, chat rooms or in Lemmy communities are really helpful. The hobbyist Windows server community is much smaller and has essentially no presence here on Lemmy.
Most open source software, especially piracy-related software is just assumed to be run on Linux, so there are almost never sufficient instructions for how to do something on Windows. The CLI (which you sometimes have to use for these kinds of things) is vastly different on Windows and Unix-like operating systems like Linux, macOS or BSD.
I actually used this a few years ago (never noticed the ads or popups because I always use an adequate ad-blocker with lists that also filter out stupid banners and other annoyances), but I immediately stopped using it after I learned about the parent company. It's not like they made much profit from me anyways, but still, they see which articles you're visiting, and I wouldn't trust them with this information.
The main reason I used it was the design anyway, ever since Wikipedia slightly updated their standard theme to make it look more modern. I hope they start using the Citizen skin for MediaWiki, which would finally make it look like an actual modern website. Other wikis like The Apple Wiki also use it, and it's beautiful in my opinion.
I couldn't find anything on that yet. I think that since the project is still in a rather early stage of development, it's more of a proof of concept. But I do know that the PCAPs are saved on the device, and you can download them onto another computer.