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Comment by jagermo | Hacker News Reader

Use WPA with RADIUS. If you have a NAS at home, there is a good chance you can install a radius server on it. Or use a Raspberry Pi: http://www.binaryheartbeat.net/2013/12/raspberry-pi-based-fr...

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Quite a few clients lack WPA2 Enterprise capabilities, especially in the home network sector (hey, playstation, I'm looking at you), making this a no-go for a sizable chunk of the population.

A playstation is not a portable device, therefore it doesn't need wifi (they shouldn't even have included a wifi card IMO)

Not only does it not need it, but the difference between gaming on Wi-Fi and gaming on Ethernet is immense. For any competitive game, Wi-Fi is a no-go to begin with.

There's people that still enjoy a good old-fashioned single player game, but would love to get patches via the internet. Wifi is perfectly fine for that, even sneakernet would be, but the playstation doesn't support that.

PS4 games are getting quite large, I've got PS4 games that are 70+ GB. You really don't want to download those over wifi.

My laptop pulls 280 Mbps according to fast.com. Switching to wired gives me 700 Mbps so I guess the difference is between a forty minute wait and a 15 minute wait, but either way it's fast enough that I'll take the convenience of not having to lay cables.

I imagine everyone else feels the same way: mostly limited by the upstream. If I had 100 Mbps Internet, there'd be no difference, for instance.

You fail to account for the shitty wifi chipset in the PS4, no way you're getting 280Mbps over wifi on a PS4. Even wired downloads max out at around 300Mbit, even though I easily get 900+ mbit on e.g. a speed test.

That assumes you get 300Mbps internet. A common max in Germany is 50Mbps, many people are still stuck with 16Mbps. 100Mbps and more are comparatively rare. Wifi speed is not the restricting factor, even with the PS4s chipset.

Sounds like a shitty situation for Germans, but here stateside cable ISPs have been offering 100+Mbps plans for a few years, and Telcos like Verizon ran fiber to quite a bit of their footprint. Gigabit is increasingly available, especially in urban areas.

If you're a pro gamer maybe, for more casual gaming on public servers (good) wifi hardly makes a difference in my experience.

> Not only does it not need it

Well you don't need a Playstation to begin with, but millions of users find it a useful feature.

> For any competitive game, Wi-Fi is a no-go to begin with.

Sure, but it's also used for streaming, as well as downloading/patching games, including single-player titles.

I rent an apartment with double brick walls everywhere. I cannot install cabling in the wall, or really anywhere it's not a severe trip hazard. For the most part, this is fine, because almost every device I own that requires internet access has wifi. (The few that don't, like my NAS, can live next to my networking equipment.)

Your suggestion would have meant that I couldn't connect my Playstation to the Internet, which is a little bit silly, especially given that my scenario is not an uncommon one.

CAT5 and duct tape are your friend. I have the same problem and it’s quite easy to manipulate it around and behind things without problems. One section of cable I have is 19m to span a 3m floor.

We have to do this because I live in crowded London and WiFi barely works when you have 40 other networks next to you.

> CAT5 and duct tape are your friend.

That's heinously ugly though.

It's certainly not aesthetically pleasing, although there is some mileage in that department with printed duct tapes, but it works which is the main thing. To be honest with careful routing it's only taped down in one place in a corner. You wouldn't know there were any cables running around unless you look very carefully.

There are cable channels out there, including really slim ones. They make it slightly less ugly.

That's only because you can't see RF pollution. In comparison, it's tidy.

> I rent an apartment with double brick walls everywhere. I cannot install cabling in the wall, or really anywhere it's not a severe trip hazard.

Hollow baseboards.

Powerline adapters are pretty cheap nowadays and fast enough. I get synchronous 200mbps over a pair of TP-Link gigabit ones in a place with really poor quality wiring, and they come with power pass-through so I don't even lose a power socket.

> Powerline adapters are pretty cheap nowadays and fast enough

Well that was hug's point - yes, you can buy your way out of the problem, but if you have integrated Wi-Fi, you don't need to.

I do use a powerline adapter and it works but I'm afraid that there aren't too many eyes looking at them - what if they have a big flaw and it stays dark?

There's no way these adaptors aren't vulnerable, given the nature of them. In my opinion. Extracting the signal from the mains and feeding it into GNU Radio for demodulation, then subsequent attack, would be an interesting exercise.

Why is that? AFAIK, the data is encrypted.

Try telling your landlord to install cabling everywhere. I'm in the lucky position that I had cabling installed when they wired my apartment, but I'm aware that I'm the exception.

That is not a solution: Today's computer is the smartphone with wireless Internet access.

(I know, I know, we here still use traditional computers but we are probably a minority …)

Oh, sure that's not the solution - I don't connect my laptop to cables everywhere I carry it. It's still nice to have wires strung because that allows me to connect all stationary equipment to a cable (IPTV receiver, apple TV, TV, Playstation, VOIP, etc.) and position Wifi APs where they're needed. Cables still provide the best and most stable network, despite all advances in Wifi tech. I can absolutely recommend doing this if you have the opportunity. The cost is negligible if you're about to (re)do the electrical wires.

Oh well. I guess I’ll be connecting my iPhone via Ethernet....

https://lifehacker.com/hack-together-a-way-to-connect-an-ipa...

Plug the USB-to-Ethernet adapter into the camera adapter

Plug an Ethernet cable into the USB-to-Ethernet adapter Plug the Ethernet cable into your router

Plug the lightning cable into the camera adapter

Plug the lightning cable into the power adapter (or powered USB hub)

Plug the power adapter (or powered USB hub) into the wall

Connect the camera adapter (or the powered usb hub) to your iOS device

Completely unrealistic, sorry, but I don't want to have to bother laying cables everywhere in my home.

Does it really help? One comment on reddit suggests that switching to RADIUS is not enough to be protected against this kind of attack. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/76lj5q/this_is_a_...

The other article says the opposite:

The attack works against both WPA1 and WPA2, against personal and enterprise networks, and against any cipher suite being used (WPA-TKIP, AES-CCMP, and GCMP).

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