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.
That’s a freaky ass idea. I believe you can use the router to spoof or some shi but that was back in wep most use wpa2 so idfk brah but I like the way your brain thinks hehe I was literally asking the same thing not too long ago
In Germany we have an initiative called Freifunk (roughly „Free Wireless Radio“). They are building free wifi mesh networks in larger cities. Their members use their ISP connection with special mesh network router software. The initiative collects donations to improve their infrastructure and fend off liability claims.
Edit: There has been a thread about Freifunk here already.
First 6 months of marriage (first one, late 2010), we found an open wifi connection in our apartment complex and used that to our hearts content. This was when some people still didn’t understand why securing your wifi was necessary.
I miss the early days of WiFi, when routers were unsecured by default. If you lived in the city or suburbia, you were pretty much guaranteed free wifi.
Back in the 2000s I lived with my grandma for awhile, and even though she had internet, I would use the wifi from a few houses down. I only got 2 bars and was limited to 1.5Mbps, yet it was still over 5x faster than her 256Kbps DSL line.
Not pirated but my local cooperative ISP is offering to split the fiber connection with neighbors and give advice on how to do so.
We can even have two bills, two completely separated intense accesses on one fiber connection and they will split the bill in two, or three, or four (plus add a few euros for administrative fees)
Yeah. Twenty years ago. I worked for two ISPs over the years. At both of them the test accounts for support to use were unmonitored accounts due to how many places they were used and logged in by. In both cases I simply put those login details into my home setup and got free internet for probably about three years. Before that some friends got a un/pw file from a university and decrypted a few hundred names and passwords for accounts which gave free dialup access to students. Again multiple logins seemed allowed so the only person losing was the uni/isp. Used to be able to pull about ~14gb a month through a dialup connection. Probably via napster, kazaa and soulseek, I can’t remember if torrents were a thing back then.
We shoulder-surfed a tech back in the 90s when he was getting us set up. Thus, the “HAHA FREE” dialup connection was born.
Gave years of service to our old beige box.
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)
15 years ago I went on a 3 month Semester at Sea study trip on a small cruise ship circumnavigating the globe.
There was only a handful of whitelisted sites available on the WiFi, otherwise you would need to pay a ton for the satellite connection or … have a staff password.
At least with my group we had a a healthy list of credentials that had been acquired in various ways. Even with occasional password changes, we managed to stay connected.
Exactly the opposite in fact. I aspire to host the exit node! I’d love for my whole neighborhood to mesh our networks together and form an Intranet of self hosted services. It’s a massive uphill battle in suburbia, but I have high hopes for similar projects in my local city proper.
This is super cool and I’ve always wondered if it was possible. Do you know how you’d do it? And have you started it yet?
I’ve “started” but only so far as working on my home lab/server and home network. In theory if I get everything setup in advance, it’s as simple as getting some high gain WiFi antennas and getting other people to put their routers in bridge mode and configuring them to extend my network.
That being said, I am building out my home server with this goal in mind. An effective mesh network will have multiple devices hosting redundant instances of all the services, and the more devices doing that the more resilient the network is. To that end I’ve taken to learning NixOS for the reproducibility. Because your system is declared in a single file, and hardware specific config is separated from that, I can turn any device into a node in the mesh simply by installing NixOS and pulling the config of an existing node.
Eventually I’d love to basically build my own routers from single board computers and high gain antennas that I can just give to people. Basically a plug and play, preconfigured device that will pickup the existing mesh, or create a new origin node if not in range.
The super long term dream or goal of this would be to include a very long range, slower connection between origins to trickle feed content changes. Depending on the dystopia we end up in, this could be done with crazy strong WiFi signals, radio, LoRa, or even (inspired by factorial logistics robots) gliders or drones that are themselves carrying mesh network nodes and fly over bubbles of mesh networks.
It’s all kind of a pipe dream, but I’m at least educating myself for a time where more people begin to realize the World Wide Web as we know it is crumbling.
I have 15 years at go the same idea (including the balloons) and current i looking in to this mostle about the iprange. For the hardware you need to look to the youtuber tomazzaman that create there own router.
I want to do this more my neighborhood. How’s it going for you and how are you getting started?
See my reply to the other comment under mine. Though I’ll add I feel like I “got started” when I met a bunch of local amateur radio operators and we all got chatting about long distance, wireless data transfers, which would add a lot of resilience to a mesh system.
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.
So here is what I do when I’m staying at my rented house near my college. I took a fiber connection from the ISP. But a friend of mine lives nearby he uses his landlords WiFi from the same ISP. From him I got the WiFi pass. And I discovered that that WiFi router uses admin1 as it’s admin password. So I got the ppoe username and password from it. The next month I didn’t paid the ISP bill so they suspended my internet connection. And put that ppoe username and password on my router. The ISP was calling me for two months to pay the bill but I didn’t. And somehow they stopped calling and I still have the fiber connection. It’s been over a year now and in still using it.
In the U.S. during the 90’s, there were free ISP dial-up trial CD’s everywhere, especially in retail checkout lanes. You were free to take as many as you wanted which was great because each CD had a unique code for the trial period offered.
After installing the providers software and creating a free email address, you’d signup for a new account and get anywhere from 30 minutes to “thousands of hours” of dial-up internet access per CD, for free (not counting paying for a landline phone service). If you ran out, delete the account and start with a new one under a new code.
Nothing was required outside of generic info (name, address etc) which could be made up because there were no real verification checks.
Once in WEP days, before smartphones. I was on vacation on this place without internet and I cracked someone’s wifi password to get internet. It was wild how easy was to crack Wi-Fi’s passwords.
A friend of mine used to live right above a McDonalds and used their free Wi-Fi all the time.
I know someone who does business IT where the ISP were trying to charge a huge amount to connect fibre to one of their sites. Thankfully, they had another site a few miles away that was already connected. They found it was cheaper to stick a pole on each building with an omnidirectional WiFi antenna. Apparently the speeds weren’t too bad even though ping often left a little to be desired.
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.
