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Londoners Tracked By Advertising Firm's Trash Cans
schwit1 asks "How can I automatically have my wi-fi turn off when I leave the house unless I specifically turn it back on?" and provides this excerpt from Wired to illustrate why that would be useful: "Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walking past 12 locations unknowingly had the unique MAC address of their smartphones recorded by Renew London. Data including the "movement, type, direction, and speed of unique devices" was recorded from smartphones that had their Wi-Fi on. First reported by Quartz, the data gathering appears to be a Minority Report-esque proof-of-concept project, demonstrating the possibility for targeted personal advertising. 'It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices — entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices — and should provide a compelling reach data base for predictive analytics (likely places to eat, drink, personal habits etc.),' reads a blog post on the company's site. In tests running between 21-24 May and 2-9 June, over 4 million events were captured, with over 530,000 unique devices captured. Further testing is taking place at sites including Liverpool Street Station." (The name sounds a bit like a government project, but Renew London is actually an advertising / marketing firm.)
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
There needs to be an update to iOS and Android that gives users the option to disable this feature (I can't remember the official name). Users should understand that it will take longer to find access points, but in exchange, they get vastly increased privacy.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Former is free and can do what you need, latter costs a few bucks but is apparently far more versatile.
This is for Android, of course.
If you're carrying a cell phone around, you might as well surrender any idea that your movements are not being tracked by 3rd parties without your knowledge or consent. Retailers like Target are installing ANPR systems in surveillance cameras, their wifi routers are already watching for probe attempts from cell phones as a way of monitoring where you are in the store (how long did you spend in the women's section? Where on the floor did you stop to look at advertising?) and modules are also installed to track cell phone transmissions and ESNs to uniquely identify customers at checkout (you use a credit card, and now your ESN is linked to your name)...
Trash cans are watching you. Buses are equipped with similar sensors. If you are carrying a cell phone, someone, somewhere, knows exactly where you are and is going to sell this information. You are not carrying a cell phone these days: You're carrying a tracking beacon with two-way communication capability.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. It's sortof how packet-switched networks operate: It needs a source and destination. What you're talking about is a Probe request, a special type of packet when a station needs to obtain information from another station. This other station is typically an AP, but not necessarily.
Any connection made over wifi needs to broadcast a probe frame, and these are by definition unencrypted. Any station on the same channel can see them. Thus the only way to prevent broadcasting your MAC address is to disable wifi entirely. It is in no way "optional" for connecting to another wifi network, and many cell phone users want this functionality because auto-connecting to unsecured wifi allows for data transmission without incurring fees from their provider. The iPhone, for example, can receive OTA updates via open wifi, as can Android.
They aren't doing it solely to "discover nearby networks faster"; It actually saves the user money.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What he meant was "The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses when disconnected from an AP" Sure you need to send the MAC address to connect - he knows that. You don't need to send anything if you don't want to connect. It's not hard to write an app that turns off wifi outside of particular physical area. That addresses the concern they're talking about. They don't care about background data usage on the phone when they're not using it.
If you want to screw with them, do it the legal way.
1. Get netbook.
2. Harvest the MAC addresses of phones nearby as you travel.
3. Broadcast the usual queries, but spoofing the harvested MACs and ESSID lists.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
Saying people want to auto-connect to unsecured wifi networks is like saying people want to be able to drive at 150 mph. Yeah everyone would like to do it, but they realize it's such a stupid thing to do that almost nobody willingly does so. A random unsecured wifi net in a public area is the perfect setup for a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your email and bank login and passwords. At a minimum, automatically connecting to them should be disabled by default on all devices, and preferably there should be no way to enable such a "feature".
If you want to connect to an unsecured wifi network, you should have to make a conscious decision and take a deliberate action to do it. Auto-connecting to them is colossally stupid. So there is no need for your phone to be automatically scanning wifi nets in a manner which exposes its MAC address. If you find yourself in a random location and would like to manually connect to an open wifi net which you feel you can trust, then the phone should give up its MAC address.
If a probe request to identify nearby wifi nets requires a MAC address, that's a deficiency in the wifi handshaking standard IMHO. The phone should generate a random one just for that probe request to bypass that deficiency.
The 802.11 protocol does not require cell phones to broadcast their MAC addresses. Phones do it so that they can discover nearby networks faster, but it is completely optional.
Except, of course, that it does. In order to associate to an access point, you have to send your MAC address. [...]
To discover a nearby access point 802.11 only requires that you listen for the broadcast.
To connect to it, yes, you need to exchange MAC addresses - but this is only required if you actually want to connect to the AP.
The GP is correct, actively throwing your MAC address around to networks you have no desire to connect to is not required by the protocol and should be disabled by default.
Now, if your phone wants to go whoring around with every open AP just to save on wireless data transfer, that's a different problem...
Probably also something that should be disabled by default.
Several airports in Europe are using the same non-associating probe technique to figure out if enough security lines are open. By knowing the time from pre to post security location of a MAC address, they can tell how well traffic is flowing. Since people beyond security, on average, spend several Euros per minute, it is better for the airport to minimize the security delay. Good for passengers too.
The Globally-Unique MAC addresses seem to be a pretty blatant security and tracking problem. I've been increasingly wondering why we don't simply start randomizing the MAC address every time the device is turned on, or perhaps even randomizing it for each new connection.
Yes, in principle this could result in a random address collision between two devices. However MACs are 48 bits... this means you'd need to have over 16 million devices simultaneously connected to the same access point before there's a substantial chance of two of them randomly colliding. I'd call that a rather pretty negligible trade off to obtain some privacy and security. And if one device does detect a MAC collision it could simply re-randomize.
As for additional "security risks" of randomizing MAC addresses, not really. It's already trivially easy for someone to deliberately fake your MAC address on their own device. So no new threat there. If anything, I think randomizing (and regularly re-randomizing) the MAC address would be a security benefit. If someone does deliberately fake your MAC address, the target lock is neutralized when your device re-randomizes.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Thus their marketting database is swiftly polluted and becomes much less valuable.
Cache poisoning is hardly a new thing... the problem is very few people have the money or resources to do it along with the technical expertise and desire. Since so few people do it, this would accomplish next to nothing; In just a few days, several million entries were gathered from these devices. You travelling around might hit .01% of the available contact points. Now, if I could clone a thousand of you and randomly space them about in the target area, maybe it'd be enough to render the data integrity suspect. But I highly doubt that there's a thousand people willing to buy netbooks and engage in such activity in any given geographically bound area that size. I doubt there's even 20 people in these neighborhoods that have the technical expertise to understand and impliment such a tactic.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Most people "need" less access to the internet and start paying attention to reality.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Thank you for understand exactly what I was trying to say. However, it's not necessary to disable wifi completely. Instead, the phone should just not send any probe requests, and it should not automatically connect to an insecure network that it has never seen before.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Germany here. You have to be stupid to drive 250 km/h on a public road. Take your toys to a racetrack, not the autobahn. Sorry for your small penis.
It doesn't even have to go that far if you don't want. Just passively listen for known APs and only connect to those. Then add something friendly like a "look for WiFi" button to send out a probe when the user actively wants to connect to something and no known APs are broadcasting beacons.
I love how ignorant slashmods keep marking this as 'troll' while others who actually understand networking keep marking it informative. Sadly, the technical proficiency of people on this site continues to track lower month over month since the Dice takeover.
Now people who suggest that the people who designed the internet might have known what they are doing are moderated down while the paranoid tin foil hat crowd gets modded up for suggesting that changing the protocol is a simple handwave and people with decades of experience in this sort of thing are incompetent...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You're both right, a little at least. It's perfectly safe to connect to whatever random wifi you run across and use it in the sense it's intended, in the case that you are absolutely certain anything important is actually being encrypted at the application layer where it should be.
For most people, in the real world, they have no idea. Application programmers seem to do a really lousy job of it (as in usually dont even try) so it's certainly not safe to assume. Probably smarter in many cases simply to set your phone to only connect to networks you program it specifically to connect to. And encrypt them, so they cannot be trivially spoofed.
IF they are actually broadcasting their MAC when NOT attempting to connect to a network, that would be a bug to stomp. But I am pretty sure that part was just GPs ignorance.
And, btw, you SHOULD use encryption to browse wikipedia. You should, in fact, use HTTPS Everywhere and attempt to encrypt every single piece of data that is sent out, redundantly. This is because if you only encrypt things that you are worried about being seen, the encryption is suspicious in and of itself, and anyone investigating you for any reason (even just 'because your traffic passed our sniffer') is going to at least see exactly the data they are looking for, they will see the endpoints even if they cannot break the encryption. That 'meta data' may be more valuable than the encrypted message itself.
So if you want digital privacy, dont just encrypt important documents. Encrypt every single thing you can, and encourage others to do the same. An internet where only super-sekrit documents are sent encrypted is a fertile environment for snoops. One where the amount of traffic that is encrypted at the application level already nears 100% may be the only way to regain the privacy that we have lost in the digital era - and it certainly cannot hurt.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It listens for the network SSID. Silently, in some cases.
Have gnu, will travel.
Find me a bank or online retailer that allows financial accounting data to be submitted over insecure connections instead of SSL. I can wait.
It doesn't matter what the bank or retailer gets the data over, it matters what your phone sends it over. All too often people start browsing from an insecure entry point and only later move to a secure part of a site. This allows the MITM to change links or redirects in the insecure part and hence get the user to either enter their authentication details unencrypted or get them to enter them encrypted but to a domain the attacker controls (and therefore has a "legitimate" certificate for).
Plus ssl isn't as secure as people might like to think, for example apparently there were CAs out there who would still sign certs using md5 after md5 collision attacks became feasible allowing attackers to get themselves a cert with CA powers that was trusted by browsers*. There have also been recent attacks on SSL itself, and attacks on the way browsers combine compression with ssl.
* http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register