Unrelated.

[theweaselking]

Hypothetically: Am I a bad person for cracking my neighbours' wireless and resetting their SSIDs to "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner?"

Not that I have done this.

Because if that's wrong, I want neighbours who don't use WEP and who change the default passwords on their routers, I'm just saying.

PS: DOING THIS FROM MY PHONE. SHEESH, PEOPLE, TRY TO STAY WITHIN A DECADE.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

"Good fences make good neighbors."

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

Yes, you are. I'm sure that you can think of a better new SSID. As someone who used to have to field calls from people who had installed new wireless routers and NO password, then wondered where their data allowance had gone, your Mossad-style tactics are also overly kind and gentle.

Now change the name of their network to "Orgazmo Distribution Inc."

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I was going to come up with a list of suggestions, then realised that most of them would be better as Culture Ship names.
(Especially “What does this button d”.)

Although I think changing their SSID to “Goatfuckers unlimited” would be unnecessarily cruel and vindictive. Which is why you should do it immediately.

[drcuriosity]

Goatfuckers Unlimited sounds like a GCU to me.

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

My favorite Culture ship name might well be 'Grey Area'('Meatfucker').

GSV 'So Much For Subtlety' is also a contender.

It is hard to choose though.. there are so many good ones. And so many possible good ones too.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I said I carry a big stick.
I blame my parents.
I blame his parents.
I blame their parents.


You know what? Why reinvent the wheel? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_%28The_Culture%29)

[publius1.livejournal.com]

"I am an axe murderer. I murder axes."

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

...this reminds me, I probably should get a new wireless router soon, because that ancient POS Belkin has really poor encryption support...

[andrewducker]

Did you also change their setting from WEP to WPA2?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I have changed nothing. But I could, and the fact that I could annoys me.

[almostwitty]

Call me a darned liberal commie, but I don't mind my neighbours using my bandwidth if I'm not using it. Share and enjoy.

[harald387.livejournal.com]

This only works until you get a bill that's $150 higher than it should be because your neighbors used more throughput allowance than you're paying your ISP for.

[almostwitty]

Ah - over here in the UK, I pay for "unlimited" bandwidth for £8 a month. :)

Of course, if I incessantly abused it for downloading tons of things, they'd give me a few warnings and cap it, in all likelihood...

[harald387.livejournal.com]

Here in Canada, it's actually pretty unreasonable; unless you're with a shitty connection-reseller ISP, you've got a throughput cap, and overage charges tend to be through the roof. The connection owners recently got permission to start charging the resellers for throughput, too, which means even the 'second-rate ISP' option is going to go away in the next year.

Things are, AFAIK, similar in the US.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

*cue evil laugh*... I have an old plan with Bell (nee Sympatico) that has truly unlimited bandwidth, ideally suited for my new Netflix habit even if the speed isn't blistering. It's fast enough to get a "4 bar" video quality according to the streaming app on Xbox Live, so it's fast enough; and unlimited bandwidth comes in handy dealing with that 74GB spike my trial binge usage ran up.

-- Steve's counting the days until Bell offers him a promo rate on a faster-but-capped fiber-to-switch plan. It shouldn't be too much longer.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

No, they're not. I just heard about this crap in Canada and was appalled you put up with it.

I would never subscribe to such a lose-lose service. Then again, I don't have to.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Your choices are to pay the broadband monopoly, or don't get broadband. This is what happens in Canada, because *there is a monopoly*. It's even worse on cellphone data plans - there are two companies acting in collusion to produce the monopoly on broadband internet access. There's only a single-company monopoly for cellphones.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

So I've heard on Search Engine. Lame.

Still, someone must have come up with a work-around, something like a home router that chokes speeds to prevent over-use, or even a dynamic choke that monitors monthly usage and lets up as the user fails to use at 100%.

Mother of freakin' invention. Such a thing would pay for itself in avoided penalties in just a few months.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, all kinds of things like that exist. But I don't use one, because I don't actually care all that much. It takes *work* to get over the 125 GB/month "limit", and I get several warnings directly from Rogers before that happens, and even if I do go way over, my overusage charge is itself capped after 20GB - so 145GB costs the same as 1450GB in a month.

[harald387.livejournal.com]

Related to my above comment (and not editing it, because I'm cheap and don't pay LJ) - what are your bandwidth speeds like at £8/mo? I'm paying $70/mo (~£35? Ish?) for a 10-Mbit download pipe.

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

I pay around that (well, my work does) for symmetric 100/100 Mbit, uncapped. Sweeeeden!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Rogers, at least, caps your overusage bill at a maximum. The maximum depends on the plan!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

So set a second SSID on your hotspot, enable client separation so people on that network can't see each other, and plunk them down in a DMZ OUTSIDE your firewall so they can't read your IMs and passwords.

[almostwitty]

My new job is as a product lead, talking geek to the geeks and requirements to the clients. And I looked at your above sentence and went "Errr...."

SO how do I do that then? :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Okay. The short version is "your wireless router can TOTALLY handle running more than one wireless network at once"[1].

So you set up a normal, secure wireless network for your family and friends.

Then you tell the router to also broadcast a second, insecure network, and to treat that network like a redheaded stepchild. Nothing you care about goes over this other network, nothing from this network talks to anything you care about, and you have your wireless access point set to NOT route any traffic from one client to another client.

Poof! Shared internet connection for your neighbours, your own traffic is secure.

[1]: Most home routers do not have this option. Not because they *can't* handle it, but because disabling the functionality confuses the users less. There's usually a patch for that. With Rogers' new combo modem/router/AP devices, there's a DIFFERENT PASSWORD for that - they only give you the "customer" password, you have to call SMC or google it to get the admin password. Once you have the admin password you can totally do all this stuff.

[dgg.livejournal.com]

We see our neighbors Wi-Fi as well.

We even chat through Facebook...

...
......
...

And you all are probably wondering why we don't just go over to each others houses to chat.

...
......
...

Stop looking at me! It makes me squeamish!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Frances and I talk via Google Chat. While we're in the same house.

(For our sanity, our offices are widely separated. It's either "yell" or "IM", and IM is easier)

[almostwitty]

Is there a way to lockdown a wi-fi network without having to tediously look at the back of my router for the WEP/whatever code every time I add a new device to it?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes. Use WPA2 (or WPA, if you must) and pick a nice memorable passphrase. A movie quote tangentally related to your SSID, for example - label the network "family" and use the passphrase "anofferyoucantrefuse", or something similar.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

DOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIIIT!

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Where the hell do you people live? I'm in the slums of Rochester NY and almost all the wireless networks around me are locked down with WPA, minimum. There is one WEP and one doing MAC address filtering.

At some point I'll do a MAC clone and set up it up with some encryption, just because I'm sick of my machines trying to connect to it by default.

[wyldsatyr.livejournal.com]

First: Yes you are a bad person, but in an amusing comic book villain sort of way, so carry on.

Second: Your phone does Injection? Seriously?! Most laptops still don't come with wireless adapters that do injection. I'm assuming you didn't do this the slow way.

Third: In reality, I don't see much reason to be annoyed by this. They comprehended the need for security, but opted to trust the device not to be stupid, rather than learn the intricacies of what the equipment is supposed to do for them. It's a bad idea, as clearly illustrated by their current situation, but WEP is enough to stop 99% of their problems so they (and many others) may never realize their failure. People who crack WEP are, after all, a serious minority of computer users.

Fourth: if you actually care about their security I suggest "You need to learn WiFi security". Although personally I'm voting for "Revolving door security services".

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Nothing wrong with the slow way - my "PVR" has a wireless adapter and runs linux, so hypotethically had I done this which of course I did not because that would be illegal, it would do all the hard work. And my phone has an SSH client to get the results.

And then I could, hypothetically, connect, open their router in my phone's browser, and put in the password.

[wyldsatyr.livejournal.com]

Fair point. That phone still scares me.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Frances insists that it is a pocket-sized computer that *also* makes phone calls, not a phone.

She's kinda right.

[moiread]

I want one.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Me too.

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me to change the security on my wireless network to WPA >.>

That said, in reality you should probably just drop by and explain to them that their network is insecure. It's not like the WEP option in the config menu says "by the way, this option doesn't actually work".

What I really need is to find a way to configure the router to only accept admin logins from machines physically connected to its ethernet ports...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That's a very common option on routers. Not *home* routers, because anything that involves the device deliberately not listening to a user is something to be feared - they only *just barely* aren't manageable from the WAN by default.

And then, only because they can't put the WAN IP in the manual.

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

Actually, after some poking I discovered I can prevent wireless clients from accessing the router controls; the feature is just not properly documented. One click, and I am safer.