And no, I’m not talking about pirating on the internet, I’m talking about getting your internet connection to the outside world without paying or having a subscription or license. Something like a mesh network with your neighbors with the exit node being one person’s high-speed fiber line, or even an exit node through a free public wifi network that you’ve hidden a little repeater device within range of… something like that could be interesting. I’ve been thinking lately of a world where decentralized networks become more common, and where people can freely use the internet without paying an ISP. What are your thoughts?
You must log in or register to comment.
Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.
It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).
Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.
So, this was more common when WEP encryption was used. You could just listen to the radio traffic of the given network and collect IVs which the encryption would leak. Once you had enough pieces you could reassemble the key and access the network. When WPA came out it was harder, but tools like pyrit and john the ripper helped, so long as you were able to capture the 4-way TCP handshake.
To actually see the networks, you would build biquad parabolic antennas from old DirecTV dishes people left behind. They were very directional high gain antennas that you would just target at someone’s house. We’d also build cantennas from junk laying around. Those were interesting days.
lol I did that for a while when I was broke… for quite some time I rigged up my linksys router with wrt, set it up as a repeater for my neighbors wifi after cracking it.
Of course the real irony was after cracking it, I realized I could have cracked it much easier with a phone book (after realizing my local ISP, just used the persons phone number as the WEP key)
Vodafone has a hotspot service here in Germany. All of their cable routers have a second wifi network everyone can use (unless you opt out).
When they introduced it, it had a big flaw: They stored the MAC address of your device in their database as authorized, but never deleted it.
Hypothetically speaking, you could pay for a month, cancel the service and then browse for over a year until they noticed you and kicked you out. 😆
But I would never do that, of course.
I may or may not be using P2P devices to share my Internet with all my neighbors.
But I also paid to have the neighborhood wired with fiber for internet.
About 10 years ago, I just moved and my new neighbor had an open network. Problem was they were 2 houses away and across the street. I set up a tiny repeaters in my car with a battery pack and parked half way between us.
It worked surprising well for about 6 months.
Haha, awesome.
Hell, you could pickup a used car battery and have power for a week!
Nope, I prefer being able to run my own network router, open/close my own ports, block ads on the network, hopefully get as much bandwidth as I can, etc. so it’s usually better for me to subscribe to my own internet.
… But since you bring it up, coincidentally I currently live on a street with shops/restaurants on the main floor under me. And all their wifi networks are visible from my apartment… so technically yeah, if I go through the trouble of collecting all their wifi passwords I could just hang out on their networks for free internet. Internet probably wouldn’t be great and not very private without a VPN but for free web browsing it should work.
Pirating wifi doesn’t preclude any of this. See also the GL.iNet devices, such as the GL-MT3000.
There are options out there to utilize multiple wifi networks at the same time, you probably wouldn’t have what you need to get a fancy ‘similar to enterprise level’ solution going, but there are a bunch out there with the goal of using multiple networks purely for speed.
A long time ago lived in an apartment and used an openwrt router and some can-tenas to connect to the leasing offices guest wifi. Worked okay for about a year. Made sure to limit my torrents to after business hours. Then i was able to buy my own service so retired the setup.
In my previous home I was possibly using the wifi of my neighbors sometimes. Just for fun. Since they left the default password on it. I could even login into their router once on wifi. And open ports or whatever. That I didn’t do.
I’m currently broke enough that I just rely on the public Xfinitywifi signal and a relative’s Xfinity login. If I need not-weird-captive-portal-internet for something, I bridge and rebroadcast the Xfinitywifi connection using my laptop.
Not exactly pirating but thought this might be a useful anecdote to share
I think this fits the definition of pirating as presented in the OP.
Back in the WEP/WPS days it was easy enough to use aircrack-ng and get access to a network. Anything public is likely to be slow and probably no access to open ports or manage it in any way.
I’m paying ~$45 CAD/month for a symmetrical 500Mbps line and I think its worth it. I’d never share this with anyone I don’t know because my name is on it, anything anyone does will come back to me.
Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,
I’d never share this with anyone I don’t know because my name is on it, anything anyone does will come back to me.
I’m the opposite. I keep no password on my wifi so I have plausible deniability
Just as s comment for someone else reading this: if this actually has a chance to protect you is highly dependant on your local laws. Even then, at least from my understanding, any lawsuit has to progress relatively far (involving lawyers to a significant degree) for this to become potentially relevant.
It would probably be safer legally to have a long range wifi and let users sign up for free, after agreeing to obey the laws. And then some kind of no-log or worthless-log policy.
If you do that then you’re probably violating your ISPs TOS and they’d can you anyways, and if they really don’t like you sue for it.
Here that doesn’t change or help in any way. You’re the one on the contract for the Internet access, so you’re responsible. That’s it.
You can operate as an ISP, but the requirements and responsibilities that go with that make this a non-starter. From my (limited) understanding, it includes that if you can’t provide the identity of someone who is being sued (including piracy, but also any other law breaking), you’re responsible.
When I was living in a car I’d wardrive nightly to find Wifi. This was before Wifi was commonly available in public spaces, and household routers often used a default password or no password at all. I’d use it to pirate games and movies to keep myself entertained.
Later I moved into a 4 plex apartment and convinced the neighbors to share one Internet connection. We ran ethernet through walls and across the roof and split the bill.
About 20 years ago, there was only dial-up internet available in my street. My parents lived about 200 m away from me in another street, and they could get ADSL. So I set up a wireless bridge to them, and it worked surprisingly well after some tweaking. Kept it running for a few years, eventually got my own connection because one day my dad called me because he needed the router password. Turns out he was also sharing the connection with his neighbour who was running an internet radio station.
Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.
Ah, yes, the WEP key passphrase era. I was a student then, and you could find me on the roof trying to get a stable signal to inject and capture data packets. Otherwise, no internet for me.
Or he believes in sharing his internet like the Freifunk People do.
Not everyone who is sharing something for free with you is a moron you’re taking advantage of. Pretty disgusting worldview
They said “pretty sure”, not certain. Statistically, they were right, until routers started shipping with “secured” wifi settings by default. Nowadays, its the reverse.
It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.
There is freifunk in Germany they use Mesh Network -> Router > VPN to another Country so they dont get Problems by People pirating.
Wait but the mesh network is virtual they don’t have their own antennas right?
Wo kann ich da mehr drüber lernen? :3
I just released the 6th patched router for friends to expand the network. In the area we use it its already available but using more router extends the range and network quality.
used GL.iNet GL-AR300M16-Ext routers btw
About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.
The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.
I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.
We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it’s been a while), and because my modem wasn’t registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn’t last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)
