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?
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)