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Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots
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."
Or you could...you know...actually secure your wifi.
Living With a Nerd
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/
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 or running it through a Swedish Chef filter or the ilk.
that is spelled $#!+
I'd like to see my neighboor get into my wired network.
You Damn kids, get off my wifi!!
Just install some snooper and logger and let the neighbour in, steal the credentials to his bank account, brokerage account, clean them out, and bankrupt him and force his home into foreclosure and buy it yourself using his own money that you stole. Now no pesky neighbour riding free on your WiFi. Instead you come up with some lame network names? Dumb.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Set up your devices with static addresses and set a dhcp scope above the addresses that you need. Then you transparently redirect any http request originating from the dhcp scope to say, www.google.com (or something nastier to be left to your imagination), using the power of iptables. Now, no matter what website the piggy backer tries to visit, he will be greeted with the ubiquitous google.com home page. Watch how quickly the neighbors will learn to leave your network alone.
It's questionably vulgar. And I know all my neighbors are seeing this.
The best thing about the name was when my girlfriends mother stayed over for vacation. She brought her laptop and asked for the name of our WiFi network. My girlfriend said it to her in a mumbling embarrassed tone.
You're an asshole. Whatever happened to Love Thy Neighbor?
If I found out you were doing that to me, I'd beat your nerdy ass till it was blue.
Retard. People like you are the reason no one likes their neighbors.
I mean, how hard would it really be if every router shipped with a unique SSID and a default random password?
Not very..AT&T has been managing this with their CPEs for at least 4 years. They simply use the serial # printed on the CPE as the default password. Unique and not likely to be guessed.
The routers that verizon hands out with their FiOS service do exactly this. They have a unique 6 character hexadecimal string as the SSID, and each has a unique WEP password that's printed on the bottom of the router on a sticker.
Now I know this isn't perfect (WEP security limitations aside), but it's sure as hell better than every single customer in my apartment complex having "Linksys" or "Netgear" access points with no encryption and default passwords.
I quickly ran into a limitation on the size of the NAT with this freebie router so I run my own router as the primary, and simply use the Verizon device as a bridge/media converter so my set top box can obtain guide info and IPTV (on-demand video) since it only has a coax interface.
Well, needless to say, he was a computer moron.
Well, you're the moron who can't get windows XP to connect to your own wireless network.
Pot, kettle.
This is acting like a dick. It's not his fault you can't configure your wife's laptop, and it's not his fault that he didn't know how to lock down his router.
What did your little episode teach him? To come ask the asshole next door (who hacks his system on the sly to annoy him) next time his computer has a problem? Why not just ask him to do it nicely, or offer in the first place? Oh yeah, because you wanted to harass him and make money out of him. Nice.
Hope your plumber/mechanic/etc neighbours pull the same trick on you sometime.
This is funny only because I once had a conversation with someone using SSID. It was back and forth quips everyday about how my house is better than theirs and so on and so forth.. I realized how incredibly interesting it was to have a "conversation" with SSIDs and how incredibly geeky it was..
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
Holy crap, why didn't you just talk to your neighbor to begin with? Talk about passive aggressive. The real moron here is the one who couldn't get the laptop to ignore a wifi network.
#!/
I've never had the problem you describe with XP. I set the rogue SSID to manual connect, and it never bothers me.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
In the real world, it just opens up yourself to litigation if someone does something illegal over your network.
I suppose you have one, single, real-world example where this has actually happened? I mean, you wouldn't just be throwing out frightening hypotheticals, would you?
But you neglect the fact that there is a protocol.
By publishing the ESSID, you invite other to connect to your network.
There is no need to publish an ESSID, and you could always lock the network.
If you leave the door open, and put a sign outside that says "come in", people might come to your house. For example, that's how retail works, and that's why we don't put "come in" signs at our front doors.
I don't like my neighbours because they leave passive-aggressive notes as their SSID. I AM NOT A HOSEPUNCHER! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS.
That's the guy that take normal garden hose and makes sprinkler hose out of it by punching tiny little holes from one end to the other. The previous job description, "leak maker", has been deprecated.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
"Windows is now connecting to the 'Psychic Friends' network."
Makes me smile, every time.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
They were both morons. The neighbor just lacked knowledge, while the poster lacked knowledge, research skills (I'm sure the answer is in knowledge base), and apparently is a sociopath.
I even if solving the problem at the neighbor's router was the best solution, wouldn't it have been more neighborly to just ask him to set the SSID to hidden, and maybe tell him how to secure his router? What's with the BOFH abuse and then charging his neighbor for the privilege. They had a mutual interest in tweaking the router, so they should have been able to come to an agreement which didn't involve money changing hands: turning off SSID makes the router less useful to its owner.
Your neighbors are your neighbors. You're supposed to talk to them, loan and borrow tools and knowledge (within reason. obviously you wouldn't do a free surgical consult). Setting a password is a "do it while chatting over coffee" activity. You wouldn't bill your neighbor for helping nail down plywood shutters before a hurricane and you shouldn't bill you neighbor for helping him type 8-14 letters in a text box and clicking enter.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
"Passive-aggressive" is a catch-phrase that has been broadened in pop psychology, in part because the Internet has permitted so many more avoidant behaviors and people need a name for it and use the one that has enjoyed more use in the popular (primarily entertainment) media.
You will find this funny.
If I caught my neighbors using my wifi, I'd ask them how they cracked WPA2-AES.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The SSID of my unsecured 'guest' hotspot (for friends' cell phone and such) has be called 'keystroke_logger_enabled" for years.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Trouble with your analogy is that wifi routers default to being relatively secure these days. you would be hard pressed to buy a router within the last few years that wasnt secure by default.
If the owner has made his router open its practically certain that it was intentional.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
If you had access to the router why didn't you just but a ban on your wife's laptop to prevent it from being able to join?
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Someone else being a jerk first does not make your actions less rude.
So because you can't operate YOUR computer properly (XP connecting to this guy's router), you decide to fuck up his internet?
Asshole.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
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.
#202477 +(7983)- [X]
(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
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You had all kinds of opportunities to do this right, but instead you consistently choose to be a passive aggressive dick to a guy who didn't even have any idea he was doing something which was not completely perfect. Nice job.
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.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Open your wifi a couple days before you go on vacation and set squid to redirect all the "bad" sites to some scary warning page you made up. Then immediately disconnect.
The warning page will show your neighbour's lan address, but your public IP and your street address, together with some severe warnings.
Two days later, have some friends drag you out of the house into a dark car. For effect they can also carry out an old computer monitor. When you return two weeks later, look angrily at your neighbor.