Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnbear | Hacker News Reader

I assumed it would be Bluetooth. Walking/driving around with headphones powered on waiting to pair.

WiFi network mirroring is smart.

>wifi network mirroring is smart

Yep, so smart that I used to name my WiFi “McDonald’s Free WiFi” when I lived half a block from McDonald’s. Everyone’s phones would connect but to my goatse’d image network.

I thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking but I guess not.. maybe I should start doing this again at my local Home Depot

Edit: just remembered I used to do this on planes too. I would MiTM the AP and people would connect to my WiFi device. Then I would serve an obvious incorrect Bank of America page. No one logged in to it though :(

I thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking

The use of multiple APs with the same SSID is a feature, not a bug. It enables roaming between them.

… I suppose an unprotected network is always unprotected, but it is still possible¹ to have AP roaming while detecting that you're switching to a different network of APs, even if the name is the same.

¹within a protocol design "possible". WiFi can't, AFAIK, actually do it.

The client could be made to drop a connection if various things are too different (default gateway not matching, for example) but it would be pretty janky with false positives and false negatives...

Creating rogue APs is criminal-adjacent, unethical behavior because it denies and interferes with a network. It could even be criminalized in some jurisdictions.

Tell that to Xfinity.

Well they are exempt from most laws.

Comcast can die screaming, fiery deaths with rapid reincarnation between them.

The were the only ISP in a certain suburban wooded area. During planned power outages they would go out after ~16 hours because they failed to engineer survivability (choice of electrical circuits and backup power) as the cell phone networks, municipal water, and other critical services did.

I really meant the choice to use it here, not the implementation of how it works.

> WiFi network mirroring is smart

Thanks!

I don't usually use bluetooth _that much_ so I didn't think about it. My cousin's truck was around, which was indeed paired with the phone - but it would have been a bit more cumbersome to use in the search anyways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com