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.

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: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).