Simon Willison's Weblog: wifi

Quoting Graham Sutherland

2017-10-16T14:14:48+00:00

TL;DR on the KRACK WPA2 stuff - you can repeatedly resend the 3rd packet in a WPA2 handshake and it'll reset the key state, which leads to nonce reuse, which leads to trivial decryption with known plaintext. Can be easily leveraged to dump TCP SYN traffic and hijack connections.

— Graham Sutherland

Tags: security, wifi

Wireless access points or mesh networking?

2017-01-05T22:00:00+00:00

My answer to Wireless access points or mesh networking? on Ask MetaFilter

I recently acquired the Netgear Orbi based on this recommendation in the wirecutter and it provides excellent fast wifi across our whole apartment where our previous non-mesh router failed to do so (tested using fast.com)

It has parental controls via the Netgear Genie app but I have no idea if they are any good.

Tags: ask-metafilter, networking, wifi, resolved, speed, parentalcontrols

Firesheep

2010-10-25T09:11:00+00:00

Firesheep

Oh wow. A Firefox extension that makes sniffing for insecured (non-HTTPS) cookie requests on your current WiFi network and logging in as that person a case of clicking a couple of buttons. Always possible of course, but it’s never been made easy before. Private VPNs are about to become a lot more popular.

Via Hacker News

Tags: cookies, security, wifi, recovered, firesheep

Eye-Fi launches

2007-11-11T22:40:33+00:00

Eye-Fi launches

Really neat idea: a digital camera SD card with built-in WiFi to beam your photos straight to your laptop. SitePen built the UI, which runs in your browser on top of Dojo and talks to a small web server running locally.

Tags: digital-cameras, dojo, eyefi, javascript, photography, sitepen, wifi

What I did at Hack Day

2007-06-19T10:32:14+00:00

What I did at Hack Day

John McKerrell made a tool for updating your FireEagle location through a DNS query, useful for sneaking around for-pay WiFi nodes.

Tags: dns, fireeagle, hackdaylondon, john-mckerrell, wifi

The Truth About Wireless Devices

2007-05-27T14:09:37+00:00

The Truth About Wireless Devices

“After eating babies, the WiFi Routers will grow to enormous size and attack our cities.”

Tags: funny, wellingtongrey, wifi

Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children

2007-05-26T22:12:37+00:00

Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children

Ben Goldacre tears the ridiculous Panorama WiFi episode to pieces.

Tags: badscience, ben-goldacre, panorama, wifi

The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps

2007-05-26T09:55:33+00:00

The Oxford Guide free WiFi plotted on Google Maps

The guide offers a geocoded Atom feed which can be directly plotted on a Google Map.

Tags: google, google-maps, oxford, theoxfordguide, wifi

Category Free Wifi on The Oxford Guide

2007-05-26T09:51:48+00:00

Category Free Wifi on The Oxford Guide

More hotspots, this time with RDF, Atom and RSS feeds.

Via kierenmccarthy.co.uk

Tags: oxford, theoxfordguide, wifi

Oxford on hotspotr

2007-05-26T09:47:21+00:00

Oxford on hotspotr

Nicely designed community WiFi hotspot site. Only lists two for Oxford at the moment; I plan to add more as I confirm them.

Tags: hotspotr, oxford, wifi

WiFi Hotspots in Oxford

2007-05-26T09:46:19+00:00

WiFi Hotspots in Oxford

The best list I’ve found, but that’s not saying a lot.

Tags: oxford, wifi

Extending a WiFi network with two Macs and a FireWire cable

2007-04-12T13:59:14+00:00

Last night's Oxford Geek Night went really well, despite more than the usual flurry of problems. It's definitely true that the more geeks there are in a room the less likely it is that the projector will work! Thankfully we got everything up and running in time for the talks to start, although it was a pretty close call.

A few of the talks needed internet access from the stage - always risky at conferences, which is why I've taken to recording screencasts of anything I want to demonstrate just in case there's a problem. For the last event we hooked up a mobile phone to a laptop running an ad-hoc WiFi network, which was slow but worked fine. This time round we checked with the venue well in advance to confirm that their WiFi had been installed.

The wireless was indeed up and running, but there was one pretty significant problem: the stage was just out of range! We could pick up a network signal fine from about 10 feet away from the stage, but the layout of the building meant that the stage itself was a WiFi blackspot.

At that point the evening started feeling a bit like Apollo 13. We had a bunch of laptops, various cables (but sadly no 10 foot network cable; that's on the list for next time) and about half an hour to go before the event kicked off. That's when I remembered that Internet Connection Sharing under OS X has a "FireWire" option.

So here's how to build your own WiFi repeater using two Macs and a FireWire cable:

Connect Mac A to the existing WiFi network. Confirm with ping or a browser.
Turn off the AirPort card on Mac B (for the moment).
Run a FireWire cable between A and B.
On Mac A, bring up System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet.
Share your connection from "AirPort" to "Built-in FireWire".
On Mac B, find System Preferences -> Network -> Built-in FireWire, and check that you've successfully connected.
Confirm that Mac B can see the internet, using ping or a browser.
On Mac B, browse to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet.
Share your connection from "Built-in FireWire" to "AirPort".
Click "AirPort Options..." and set a name for the new network (and optional WEP key). This is the network that other machines will connect to.
Hit "Start".

All we had to do then was position our pair of laptops somewhere that was in WiFi range of both the venue network and the stage. Job done!

Except for one thing... we forgot to factor in the dampening factor of human bodies. As the area filled up the signal strength from the venue WiFi reduced, leading to intermittent network failures. The nice thing about laptops is that you can move them around, so for the talks that needed network access Nick and I stood near the door with our laptops held over our heads.

It's a good thing the venue microphone showed up at the last minute, as our backup plan for that involved two laptops, a USB microphone, a patch in to the mixing desk and iChat AV...

We've started adding slides to the official site, and will hopefully soon have videos up there as well. If you took any photos at the event tag them on Flickr with oxfordgeeknight2 to have them show up on the site. Nat's planning the next event for June or July, so subscribe to the announce-only mailing list if you want to stay informed.

Tags: events, macos, oxfordgeeknight2, oxford-geek-nights, torchbox, wifi

PyCon Wireless Network

2007-04-06T10:39:25+00:00

PyCon Wireless Network

Conference WiFi is generally bad, and getting worse as more people turn up with laptops. Here’s how Sean Reifschneider built a solid network for PyCon 2007 for $2200 in hardware and 70 hours of work.

Tags: pycon, python, seanreifschneider, wifi