Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots 263
the digital nomad writes "If you've had enough of your neighbor stealing your Wi-Fi connection or letting his dog s#%t on your lawn, there is now a better solution than suffering in silence with your brooding anger: leave your neighbor 'a message!' Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots let your networks say what you cannot. And if you're looking for some great name for your Hotspot, make sure to read this post by Gizmodo."
You don't really need to be a jerk (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, some of them are a little bit funny. This would make a good humor post. But it's hard enough to stay on good terms with your neighbors as it is, so consider saying something nice. Like in driving, it's often stupid and dangerous to fight *ssholes by acting like one yourself, thinking you're going to teach them a lesson.
I run an open AP named "nohup", since it's on a UPS and is often the only one still running when the power goes out. (Unfortunately, Verizon FIOS's upstream UPS goes out after 5-10 minutes nowadays -- not the ONI in my house, which can putter along for a few hours, but something upstream of that)
Work with your neighbors to get a wifi mesh going: http://www.olsr.org/ [olsr.org]
If you still really want to dick with people, at least do something more technically interesting with transparent proxy hacks, such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upside-Down-TernetHowTo [ubuntu.com] or running it through a Swedish Chef filter or the ilk.
Convo with SSID (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Or. (Score:5, Interesting)
My wifi is normally secured, but I have some neighbors that are always trying to login. I see their attempts in the router logs and I open the router up every so often just to have fun. I set the broadcast name to "passw0rd" and changed to that password. Sure enough, they immediately log in with that key. I've set the router to deny all traffic except through my squid proxy and all pages redirect to the proxy welcome page until then. I don't care for their personal content, but it's interesting seeing the URLs that show up in the proxy. Many of them set cookies or use other auth so I can't see their content (at least not without changing some settings) but a good percentage use URL encoding so I can pull up their personal sites. The neighbors bounce a lot between facebook, gmail and some news sites. Oh and porn. The bastards watch a lot of porn. I'm probably going to start redirecting those sites to the GOP homepage or a rickroll at some point You can do this by subscribing squid to one of the blocklist sites. Nothing like a dated meme to piss off the neighbors.
Setup of the squid proxy took a few hours.. hardest part was the DNS redirect until they connect to the proxy, but there's tons of instructions now for doing it...
Re:You don't really need to be a jerk (Score:3, Interesting)
I know you are already modded Interesting. but thank you for the info,
For the record, the ESSID of my network is ParasiteNet and is always open (in the honor of C. Doctorow). My neighboor love it. They just receive DHCPNAKs when they start consuming too much bandwidth...
Re:Or. (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it possible to setup a router (e.g. linksys, netgear) to do annoying pop-ups on people's computers who are not on a MAC list? So if someone connects to my network they get a pop-up every X time....I would so spam them, every 3 seconds, with pop-ups to various animal porn sites
Re:Exactly. Using open wifi is not stealing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, you might be right IF it was not possible to accidentally do this. For about a year, my next door neighbor and I were stealing from each other. My wife had blocked our wifi ap in the laptop setup somehow (she doesn't know) and was leaching off the neighbor. When her laptop stopped working, I investigated. Found that it was not set to log to our own AP, and further found that a secondary AP of ours was in a default state, that is enabled and unsecure. Guess who was logged into it? The same neighbor who's AP her laptop had been using till he secured it. My best guess is that it had been that way for months. No party involved walked through any door, nor did we actively initiate picking up anything. There was no intent to steal, share, or otherwise deprive anyone of anything, but it happened just the same. In this case, no harm no foul. Yes, I look at the configs now and then. A recent storm reset the vonage router and it defaulted to enabled and secure but that caused interference with the AP I use so it was not left for anyone to try using it. Yes, I have UPS, so don't need obvious suggestions. The point is most equipment is set to log in anywhere it can and will happily do so without reporting where that is. Calling it theft is like accusing passersby of using images of your house without permission because they have stored a memory of their journey in their head.
Relevant Link: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Or. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CALEA doesn't let you tell (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, that's bullshit. Try actually reading the act, rather than just reading scare stories on Slashdot or third-hand accounts:
Given your average open WAP owner isn't providing "commercial mobile service", nor is a "common carrier for hire", and is actually explicitly exempt from the act, it's blatantly obvious that CALEA doesn't apply to them.
Re:Other issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that, but you didn't even have to actively help him, you could've just properly configured your wife's XP computer. Good luck in life dude, I'm guessing it sucks for you... perhaps for good reason.