Turning Network Free-Riders' Lives Upside Down

An anonymous reader writes "You discover that your neighbours are using your unsecured wireless network without your permission. Do you secure it? Or do you do something more fun? A few minutes with squid and iptables could greatly improve your neighbours' Web experience ..." Improve is a relative term, but this is certainly gentler than certain other approaches.

Comments

Goats

[ajiva]

I'm surprised the guy didn't send every link to goats.ex... He was being way too nice.

Re:Goats

[terrahertz]

Note to vindictive mods: thanks for giving meta-moderation a chance to remove your privileges. I stand by my original post, and in addition to that, I fart in your general direction.

Re:Goats

[StikyPad]

That's why whenever I go to the park, I always run toward the large flocks of pigeons while flapping an umbrella and crying out "PAKAW! PAKAW!" Sure, it's a little embarrassing, and the people who get droppings on them in the ensuing mass migration get a little upset, but if it saves even one pigeon, then it's worth it.

Unfortunately, I believe it's only scaring them away from people who charge them with umbrellas while screaming which, in my experience, is not a significant number. I fear I'll soon have to resort to more drastic measures, like holding out some popcorn and then cold-cocking the first sonofa dove that makes a lunge for it. Of course I'll tell them it's only for their own good, and it hurts me more than it hurts them.

It's not their fault...

[nick_davison]

How can you blame people for connecting to a wireless router with the ID "Free Porn"?

Granted, my neighbors didn't intentionally set their router up with that ID but they did leave it unsecured with the default password for the admin account. It was simply the neighborly thing to do to change their ID and resecure it with a new password (that, admittedly, they didn't know).

Could just watch

[MECC]

Could just watch their traffic, and when they try to bid on ebay, just slow their traffic down, then out bid them. They'll rue the day they tried to outbid 'yourneighborfromhell' on ebay.

Re:Could just watch

[irrelevant]

No, no, no. You increase each and every bid by a factor of 10, and then auto-confirm it.

Obligatory Bash.org

[Ryan Stortz]

One of my all-time favorites. :)

(Mootar) morons.
(Mootar) these people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless
(Mootar) they must think they're super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network
(Mootar) unfortunatly, the connection works both ways
(Mootar) long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer

http://bash.org/?202477

Can you imagine the tech support calls?

[Tackhead]

Substituting everything with Goatse or Tubgirl (Goatse was already done with airpwn at DEFCON 12) would be funny, but Joe Sixpack would call tech support, and they'd all shrug it off saying he'd been cracked with some sort of virus.

But can you imagine Joe Sixpack trying to explain to Pradeep that all the images in his web pages were being displayed upside-down (or better yet, blurry, or upside-down and blurry!), while all the text in the very same web pages was being displayed upside-right in crystal clarity?

Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the differences between images and text. Pradeep would hear the word "upside down" or "blurry" and immediately think it was a hardware problem.

It'd probably take any of us half an hour to convince a second-tier tech that we weren't trolling him, never mind Joe Sixpack.

I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this. (Particularly as I'm pretty sure that those of you in tech support have no use for my left nut. :)

Re:Can you imagine the tech support calls?

[nizo]

I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this.

Maybe you can, if your neighbor is using your network connection to fullfill all his VOIP needs.

Re:Liability?

[`Sean]

What are the odds that a neighbor would use your network and then sue you for the content that your are sending to him?

Yeah, ailurophobia is a bitch.

Re:Trying to make others feel as stupid as you wer

[SoTuA]

By leaving it open in the first place to be stolen, you've shown your dumb.

Calling someone on slashdot dumb - mostly free.

Making a dumb mistake while calling someone dumb - priceless.

Re:You can't steal unprotected Wifi.

[realmolo]

Hey man,

I think that someone is redirecting your requests through a proxy server that randomly inserts the letter "o" into the word genius.

Moran.

blurry-net

[Sloppy]

At first, I thought there were way too many screenshots. I mean, ok, we get it. But then at the bottom of the FA, it pays off. After the dumb kitten and upside-down stuff (where they know someone is fucking with them) we get to the treasure: blurry-net. That's subtle and I love it. The ideal prank for the proverbial Man In The Middle would be to do things to confuse the endpoints, not merely annoy them.

The next step is to spy on them and see what websites they visit, and then insert some fake content one day. For example, if they use it to read CNN, insert a casual story about a nuclear weapon getting used in the Middle-East or South Asia, or a story about the president of USA selecting a new vice-president due to the assassination last week ("What?! I didn't hear about that!"), or the CDC in Atlanta is investigating the recent rash of improbable claims about the dead returning to life to feast on the flesh of the living, etc. If they visit Slashdot, then the jig is probably up, but maybe it would be great to have a story where a security study found Windows98 to kick OpenBSD's ass and then a bunch of comments where everyone agrees that the findings pretty much match their own experience, along with complains about "how is this news for nerds?!"

Re:What's the POINT?

[Ant P.]

That was a terrible poem.

Frame this

[Midnight Thunder]

I suppose you could also add a frame to every page and then sell advertising space. Since you probably know a bit about your neighbour it is much easier make targeted advertising. Of course you could always make the top frame read:

      "This is borrowed bandwidth. Have you thought about getting your own connection."

Oh and make sure it is flashing. Actually you could make it so that the whole content flash. Now that would be annoying.

Hello, tech support?

[jpellino]

Upside down is cute, but blurry is just too fantastic.
You know they were on the horn to the vendor after punching every monitor control and several loud screaming matches and an expensive service call for a monitor that then worked just fine on the bench...
As a webmaster I can now say April 1 just got very far away...