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Comment by altmind | Hacker News Reader

xfinitywifi is free for anyone who already have xfinity at home. its extemely useful when you have a local internet outage.

they are great because they authenticate with login/password only once and then remember the mac addr, you dont have to log in ever again.

hope they wont start charging for this.

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So, someone can just spoof that mac address and have their activity logged as yours? What could possibly go wrong?

Yep! Last I checked (which admittedly was a while ago), 00:00:00:00:00:01 was valid for xfinitywifi

I feel like it could also have bad legal consequences to have your MAC associated with an xfinity account. What if somebody spoofs your MAC and does sketchy illegal things? Similar to anecdotal stories I heard about people running TOR relays and subsequently hearing from law enforcement.

Thinking about this again, there's a bit of difference: most people running a Tor exit node probably made a conscious decision to take this risk.

Agreed with this.

Comcast is a terrible company in pretty much every way, shape, and form, but xfinitywifi has been useful to me many times now as a usable fallback when nothing else is available.

Better OS-level tools to manage these connections (i.e. intelligently not connect and flag as degraded) when the signal or backing network is extremely weak would be a huge boon though.

It’s also great for iot devices. Gives them access to the internet with no access to other devices in your home. You do have to spoof their mac address on a device with a browser to get them online though.

If you have decent routers you can do that too. For example you can create a separate ssid with different IP space and NAT.

But that’s still giving an iot device access to my router and allowing it to connect to the internet with the same public ip address as the rest of my devices. I would rather not take the chance.

> you dont have to log in ever again.

That isn't my experience. Every so often I visit a few locations and hop on the xfinitywifi, and I need to authenticate each time.

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