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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

Related question: do they still sell motherboards with master admin passwords like they did in the 90s? I remember finding a list of them someplace online then trying one on my friend's Award BIOS and being astounded that it worked. Seems unthinkable in this day and age but it was definitely a thing.

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Nowadays they make them dependant on the serial number of the device, the idea being if you get locked out of your own device you can contact the manufacturer with the serial number and recieve the override code.

Quite predictably however, some motivated individuals have reverse-engineered how these codes are generated and made online tools that can generate them as well(1).

[1] https://bios-pw.org/

I used this to make a Dell laptop sold without password usable again.

There was a setting to disable the override password, but that was left disabled. I do wonder what the point of this secure password is if you leave a backdoor password enabled anyway.

The Huawei modem my ISP uses has a hardcoded admin password that can't be changed. It's actually higher privileges than the login you're supposed to use.

So I ended up building a separate firewall to isolate myself from that thing.

The router from my ISP lives, with his own firewall, seperated by another, purely WiFi router with his own firewall from the home LAN. I guess he lives a happy life there. His separate WiFi comes in handy so sometimes.

You are possibly the kind of wifi channel hogging neighbor I just love, with your unnecessary extra wifi radiation.

We have almost a dozen WiFis in our living room, two of which are ours. The blessing of living in a city between two reasonably large apartment buildings and two other houses.

With dual band routers being the norm, theres every chance you are really running 3 or 4.

Three, with one being, for all practical purposes, being contained by walls and reinforced concrete ceilings to the room the router is sitting in. 9 out 10 times you don't even see it in the next room.

Last time I checked my APs have recorded more than 200 wifi networks, in a complex of couple condo towers. But I still get great performance, haven't even needed to upgrade to Wifi 6.

I live at a reasonably busy intersection but in a residential neighborhood in Durham NC. My unifi controller software has recorded 620 APs in the last 12 days.

It's quite remarkable really.

In the past OEMs would put passwords on motherboard BIOS, they were usually default codes but kept customers people from pushing F1 on boot and getting in to do bad things easily.

'lkwpeter' was a popular one I still remember. Also this is still a thing. For Dell you can generate a BIOS password from the serial and this even allows you to circumvent hardware based SSD encryption.

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