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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.
When I was younger, renting in a shithole of a rental house, there was a neighbour with an open wifi. I used that for nearly 3 years when I finally decided to test the limits. One day I downloaded 15GB in under 24 hours (trust me, at the time that was a lot), the very next day it has a password on it.
I don't regret raising the red flag on that. I just wish they could know how much I appreciated the free internet when I didn't have a lot of money.
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.
Over 25 years ago, during the dial-up era, there were many computers compromised with certain worms that would open up your computer for remote connections. One of the possibilities when connected was to download the system saved passwords including those for the dial up software. I had many, many, such logins saved including corporate and education ones, with no time caps. During about a year I would only pay for the phone call, not for the internet service. Simpler times.
my friend had a black box for cable back in the day but that was about it; i would say internet would probably have been easier for the dial up networks in the 90s since most of the time they were wide open as long as you knew the number.
in dial-up times i tried to steal internet cafe's account. my purpose was using cafe account at night after cafe closed. there was a program which one is showing password with ******. i put it in floppy disk then went to internet cafe. I put the floopy disk in place and heard different sound.i looked at and my disk fell into pc case. so there was not floppy disk drive on pc. after that day i sent my friend to bring back my floppy disk. cafe owner said "that hacker never come back here again"
A friend of mine used to live right above a McDonalds and used their free Wi-Fi all the time.
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.
I want to do this more my neighborhood. How's it going for you and how are you getting started?
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?
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.
Back in my teenage ps3 days, my then neighbour's didn't set a password and the WiFi was completely open.
Sounds like you were a 1337 H4X0R back in the day
Not recently, but I had bought a USB GPS unit for my laptop back in the mid 2000's specifically for war-driving, mapping, and cracking the weak-ass encryption of early Wifi routers to share with a community of travelers when free wifi hotspots weren't really a thing.
I've been stealing your wifi this hole time.
Not during hole time!
That's probably my favorite typo that I've ever done. Fantastic. I'm not gonna correct it. It's too good.
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.
access to open ports or manage it in any way
they usually leave the default passwords on their router management
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.
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,
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.
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.
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)
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 repeater in my car with a battery pack and parked half way between us.
It worked surprising well for about 6 months.
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.
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.
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.
There is freifunk in Germany they use Mesh Network -> Router > VPN to another Country so they dont get Problems by People pirating.
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
There are a few towns that became their own internet providers b/c the big guys wouldn't bring them either any or adequate service and they realized they could do it themselves more cheaply. They had to fight anti-socialism propaganda and of course lobbying and disinformation campaigns from the big providers, despite the fact that they had no intention of ever going there.
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 :)
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.
When I was in college, I rented a house just outside my budget and found I couldn't afford things like cable internet.
I had a wifi->ethernet bridge that was originally to connect my OG Xbox to a wifi network. I also had neighbors with Wifi using WEP encryption. An idea was born.
Was able to use aircrack-ng on my laptop to crack their WEP key in about 15 minutes. Plugged that key into my wifi->ethernet bridge, and then hooked that into my router. Bam, my whole house was online.
That worked for probably a year and a half.
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.
I'm sharing an internet connection with my neighbors for these reasons. In germany, we have "freifunk" which is just what you're explaining I think. I would definitely love to maximize this though.
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.