Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com