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."

Comments

Or.

[Pojut]

Or you could...you know...actually secure your wifi.

Re:Or.

[TheLink]

Not as fun as this:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

You might even purposely not secure your wifi ;).

Re:Or.

[digitalhermit]

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...

You don't really need to be a jerk

[rwa2]

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.

Senile old man

[xbeefsupreme]

You Damn kids, get off my wifi!!

Re:Senile old man

[maxwell demon]

I think "get off my WLAN" sounds better.
Note that WLAN is an anagram of LAWN.

Stupid idea.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

Re:Stupid idea.

[Reece400]

Just redirect them to an unsigned page, 4/5 people won't notice the difference (they've all clicked the don't warn me again check boxes at some point of other).

Re:Other issues

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Other issues

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Other issues

[RMH101]

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.

Re:Other issues

[operagost]

Your post is missing the part where you first told your neighbor about the problem and offered to fix his router for free-- you know, because it would have benefited both parties. I guess all the aggravation and wasted time and gas was worth $50, right? My mother-in-law had a similar problem (someone moved in who had a router with the same SSID on the same channel) so I changed the SSID, channel, and turned on WPA2 (which I had been looking for an excuse to do for some time).

I've never had the problem you describe with XP. I set the rogue SSID to manual connect, and it never bothers me.

Re:Freifunk

[Abcd1234]

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?

I came up with the best name

[wbav]

When people connect to my wireless network with a Microsoft machine, they see:

"Windows is now connecting to the 'Psychic Friends' network."

Makes me smile, every time.

Re:Other issues

[zippthorne]

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.

Not passive-aggressive

[michaelmalak]

Sending messages over SSIDs is not passive-aggressive, it's avoidant. It could be considered passive-aggressive in a contrived example, such as if a neighbor makes lewd comments to your wife, your wife demands that you talk to the neighbor about it, but instead you decide to communicate over SSID. In that case, you have a responsibility set up by an authority of sorts, and you have ducked that responsibility by fulfilling its terms perhaps by letter and certainly not in spirit.

"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.

Relevant Link:

[2obvious4u]

You will find this funny.