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I have a script that does the wireless connection for me. If it doen't connect to my network, it will run macchanger -r wlan0

PANERA Bread already solved this problem. If you go to a PANERA during peak hours, you get roughly 10-15 minutes of free WiFi, and then you're shut off, at the MAC address level. Thankfully, I have GNU macchanger installed, so I can grab some more time, but they're already doing it programatically.

What's funny is watching someone come in, spill out their entire office on the table (manila file folders, laptop, external number pad and everything), and then get shut off because they sat chatting at the coffee machine for 10 minutes while their laptop was connected, and shut their laptop down, only to stare at me working for 30+ minutes at a time.

Am I breaking the rules? Maybe... but I also buy a breakfast, then a tea, then a lunch in the same 1-2 hours I'm there. I also have WWAN, so if WiFi was turned off, I could still continue to work, without changing anything (all built-in).

McDonalds should just limit the free wifi to 10-15 minutes and be done with it. Oh, and also SHUT IT OFF at the end of the night, so people don't just park in the parking lot and steal your wifi for nefarious means.

As with most of these "problems", the solution is rarely technical. It is usually a political problem that stops the solution from being implemented.

or an actor

I'm not sure if you are making a joke, so just in case you aren't, I'll point out that MAC address filtering is no security at all. Your laptop is transmitting it's MAC as part of the regular wifi transmissions so sniffing it out of the air is trivial with Kismet or Kismac. Spoofing a MAC address is trivial on Linux and Windows machines, a bit more involved to make your OS X Leaopard system able to spoof but not rocket science, and apparently trivial with "spoofmac" on Tiger.

Here's an overview:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/changemac

For Linux, if you just want a random MAC to make yourself even more anonymous:
http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger

Similar software exists for windows (google "windows macchanger")

Read & Learn, And Legalize Marijuana

Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:

"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"

It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)

Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf [uni-sb.de]

And more:

http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifeha

No, TFA does NOT talk about blocking MACs, because that would be fscking stupid. Every time I reboot and reconnect to my ISP, I use a new MAC and therefore get a new IP (privacy... sure, the ISP can trace it, but anyone else has a bit tougher time without the ISPs cooperation), due to a little program called macchanger integrated into my bootscripts. Its site http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger [alobbs.com] says there's a similar program, SMAC, for MSWormOS. Even without that, a $5 new NIC is a new MAC.

I'm not sure exactly what you think you're getting 'privacy' from, but you know that your ISP looks at the MAC address of your Cable/DSL modem, and not that of your network card, right?

I dont know about DSL but in the case of cable, where there is no PPPoE-style authentication being performed, your modem's MAC literally is your authentication and a device with a different MAC won't be allowed to connect. Does DSL work differently? Someone enlighten me.

TFA mentions that Stanford and other schools charge high "Reconnection" fees after they block your MAC for sharing files. Why don't they just do something like that and make a load of money?

that they rejected this as their new splash image...

try
apt-get install macchanger
or
http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger

It'll allow you to change your mac adress

Ubuntu has much better logo! http://www.alobbs.com/images/3ubuntu.jpg

New beautiful logo!

http://www.alobbs.com/images/3ubuntu.jpg

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

Check out Cherokee as well. It's got Keepalives, Deflating, and the other stuff you need while being slim and fast.

with kismet, you will be able to see the valid mac addresses being used on the network, without being connected to it. from their homepage:

"Kismet identifies networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting (and given time, decloaking) hidden networks, and infering the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic."

then use something like macchanger, and you're in!

One thing I really miss in thttpd is keep-alive support. I am currently kicking the tires of cherokee . It supports epoll/kqueue and also does keep-alive/pipelining. Very useful if you have to serve lots of images, it even has a nice mechanism to serve cache-friendly headers I see some issues with its gzip support but the author is quite responsive

mac flashing? Just use macchanger, it is uber-easy

WEP is a horrible thing. I use it msyelf, but that's mainly to keep my non-techie neighbors from turning on their laptops one day, have windows xp realize there's a wireless connection in their range, and start using my bandwidth. I have no delusions that my data is secure since anyone could, with a little patience, use airsnort to find out what my key is.

The accesspoints of the future would hopefully have 2 WEPs: One to allow access to acesspoint and a second second one - dynamically assigned to individual clients(probably recognized by unique mac address) for all data communication between that unique client and accesspoint.

As another poster pointed out in this very article, it would be much better to have some sort of PGP encryption in the access point, where you send your public key to it, and it encrypts the data back. Problem with doing anything based on mac addresses themselves, is that you can change your mac address in both windows and linux