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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

I'm doing the first bit, but I can't turn off the wifi -- only stop broadcasting my "personal" network. And actually, as I went in to make sure that was the case, I saw that broadcasting of my personal network had been forcibly turned back on. Lovely!

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If you cannot disable it and you don't trust the wifi but need the service, wrap the isp provided box it in aluminum foil and ground that foil ( no need to try to solder on the foil, an alligator clip is more practical), the wifi will still be on but it will be completely blind. Just make sure it doesn't overheat.

These are the comments I come to HN for.

I thought you weren’t supposed to ground faraday cages, is that not the case?

it a safety mesure, the ground coud potentially act as a really crappy antenna but if the foil is touching something conducting on the modem and there is a malfunction, you want that current to go somewhere and the ground is that place.

That is what should be illegal, for electronic devices (even if rented) to be unable to disable wireless communications, or for a contract to affect the operation of stuff other than wireless communications when the wireless is disabled. It should also be illegal to be unable to disable all power to electric devices (for devices with battery power, that would include that it must be possible to remove the battery, and the method to be documented).

If you don't broadcast your SSID, then how can device manufactures have hyper accurate location services available when GPS is not? You're not participating in the system! Hell, as much money as theGoogs gives to be the default search to various companies, would they not be willing to pay ISPs to keep that option on? I'm just throwing ideas out that I know nothing about, but I don't see why they would be opposed to the concept.

This is an old article, but still accurate. By default every Xfinity router also advertises Xfinity's public wifi offering: https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/16/technology/security/comcast.... Now if you turn that off then what? Not sure, but I trust Xfinity and their lawyers to find a way :)

Doesn’t turning off SSID broadcast result in devices that have the wifi network saved repeatedly broadcast a request for the AP to identify itself in an effort to establish a connection?

They do that already... sum of all privacy losses.

Any time you go out in public your devices are crying out looking for your home AP. If someone can figure out which are you, e.g. by seeing you multiple times in different places they can then go look up where you live based on your home's SSID broadcasts.

Correcting myself: It appears that many modern client devices (at least current Networkmanager in linux, iphones, and grapheneos) have a "hidden" flag on saved SSIDs and only probe for hidden ones, so the ancestor post is correct for a least these devices.

Older and less sophicated clients, -- that don't explicitly have a 'hidden flag' for saved SSIDs will probe continually for all SSIDs they know.

I'm not sure I follow. Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network? If you never connected your device to their wifi and only connected to your wifi connected via ethernet, why would it even know to make a request? If you're not actively connecting to the WiFi in your house, why not just "forget network"? Seems like a strange hypothetical, but aren't they all?

> Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network?

I think they're referring to when you leave your home. Your device(s) will be constantly broadcasting probe requests for the hidden network.

The away-from-home probe requests wouldn't be that useful for mapping, but your AP/router is equally useful for mapping with or without broadcasting the SSID. Hiding your SSID just means it sets the SSID to null in the beacon frames but it's still sending out beacon frames with its far-more-unique MAC address (BSSID). If you're on linux you can see this pretty easily by running `sudo iw dev wlan0 scan`. The "hidden" wifi networks will have their SSID as "SSID: \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" but all the other information including MAC address is still there. Personally it seems there are two "hidden" wifi networks within range of my bedroom.

I admittedly know little about this, but isn't GPS accurate enough on most modern devices to render the SSID refinement moot?

Put the thing in a faraday box.

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