Hackszine.com: Wireless Archives

Archive: Wireless

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February 6, 2007

Un-Unwire Your Home

I've been a wireless fan for years now; my home network is pretty much an AirPort Extreme Base Station and an AirPort Express in WDS mode. I have a 5-port hub in my office for a desktop PC and my networked printer. But most of the bits that fly here, fly over wireless. However, I started getting some hints that I might be pushing it to the limit:

AirTunes would constantly drop out whenever someone was moving large files across the network
My Xbox 360 told me that my network was not fast enough to run Media Center Extender

And just a few days ago, Andy Oram ~~posted a link on an internal O'Reilly list to an article about the coming Internet traffic jam~~ forwarded an interesting post from CAnet News titled Internet to (almost) die in 2007 that riffed on recent Forbes and WSJ opinion pieces about the imminent death of the Internet.

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Bypass Pay WiFi With Ping Tunnel

A lot of hotels, coffee shops, and airports are sporting pay-per-hour 802.11 service these days. In most cases, you'll be presented with what appears to be an open hotspot and a DHCP server will give you an IP address. When you open your web browser, though, a transparent proxy will deliver you a page that asks for you to enter a credit card number. Until you've paid, outgoing TCP traffic will be blocked.

More often than not, though, the network is configured to allow ICMP packets through unfiltered. If you find one of these lucky hotspots, you can ping google.com or another external server and you'll get a response back. You can use this feature to tunnel TCP traffic through an ICMP echo request to a proxy server that you've set up on an unrestricted network!

Ptunnel is an application that allows you to reliably tunnel TCP connections to a remote host using ICMP echo request and reply packets, commonly known as ping requests and replies.
Setting: You're on the go, and stumble across an open wireless network. The network gives you an IP address, but won't let you send TCP or UDP packets out to the rest of the internet, for instance to check your mail. What to do? By chance, you discover that the network will allow you to ping any computer on the rest of the internet. With ptunnel, you can utilize this feature to check your mail, or do other things that require TCP.

To use Ptunnel, you'll need a server to run the proxy on. Your bandwidth will be a bit limited, but the software includes a simple authentication mechanism so that you can ensure you're the only one using your proxy. The way it works, it's more useful for connecting to your server via ssh than it is browsing the web. That said, it's pretty darn cool and awfully handy, especially if you need to check your mail and don't feel comfortable passing a credit card to a random wireless account server.

Download Ptunnel here and give it a shot - Link.
Nulldigital.net has a good writeup on configuration and usage - Link.

Related:

February 3, 2007

Wifi Liberator

Liberator Pic
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is one of my favorite artists, his latest - a tactical toolkit to liberate pay-per use wireless networks -

Wifi Liberator is an open-source toolkit for a laptop computer that enables its user to "liberate" pay-per-use wireless networks and create a free, open node that anyone can connect to for Internet access. The project is presented as a challenge to existing corporate or "locked" private wireless nodes to encourage the proliferation of free networks and connectivity across the planet. The project was inspired by the ongoing "battle" between providers broadcasting wireless signals in public spaces, in particular: corporate entities, wireless community groups, individual users, and proponents of open networks. Like my Wifi-Hog project, the Wifi-Liberator critically examines the tensions between providers trying to profit from the increasingly minimal costs associated with setting up a public network and casual users who simply want to see the Internet transform into another "public utility" and become as ubiquitous and free as the air we breath. The project targets pay-per-use wireless networks as often found in airports, other public terminals, hotels, global-chain coffee shops, and other public waiting points.

Wifi Liberator - [via] - Link.

Related:

Wireless Hacks, 2E

February 1, 2007

Protect Yourself at Wireless Hot Spots

Protect Yourself at Wireless Hot Spots.jpg

You can find a Wi-Fi hot spot just about anywhere now, in airports, restaurants, cafes, or even wider-range public locations. This always-on access to the Internet is great, but it also means that the related security risks follow you wherever you go. In a recent Computerworld article, our own resident Windows hacker, Preston Gralla, outlines the potential hazards and provides concrete steps you can take to protect yourself:

Connecting to a hot spot can be an open invitation to danger. Hot spots are public, open networks that practically invite hacking and snooping. They use unencrypted, insecure connections, but most people treat them as if they are secure private networks.

This could allow anyone nearby to capture your packets and snoop on everything you do when online, including stealing passwords and private information. In addition, it could also allow an intruder to break into your PC without your knowledge.

But there's plenty you can do to keep yourself safe -- and I'll show you how to do that in this article. If you follow these tips, you'll be able to make secure connections at any hot spot.

The article provides the details, but here's the rundown of the top 10 tips:

Disable ad hoc mode
Turn off file sharing
Turn off network discovery
Encrypt your email
Carry an encrypted USB flash drive
Protect yourself with a virtual private network
Disable your wireless adapter
Watch out for shoulder surfers
Beware phony hot spots
Turn on your firewall

It's a wild, wild wireless world out there. Be safe!

Related:

Don't fall victim to the 'Free Wi-Fi' scam (Computerworld article by Preston Gralla)
Wireless Hacks, 2E
Windows XP Hacks, 2E

January 30, 2007

Free 3 months of T-Mobile WiFi - Just pretend to run Vista

Img M634
A few of you sent in how to get free WiFi by changing your browser's "user agent" to be a Vista machine, so here's i-hacked.com step by step...

"For the release of Microsoft Vista, T-Mobile is offering 3 free months of their hotspot service. The catch is... You have to be running Windows Vista. (don't do it)

Here is a quick tip to get three months of free hotspot service at the firm's North American WiFi access points found at Starbucks, Borders, FedEx-Kinkos, hotel chains, etc. Turns out, they only use the agent information for validation... So that enables us to SPOOF IT!

1. Download the firefox extension for spoofing user-agents: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/59/
2. Restart firefox and goto: Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options... \
3. Click "User Agents" and then "Add"
4. Fill out the window with following info:

Description: Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista)
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Platform: Win32

5. Save it, goto Tools > User Agent Switcher > Then click the newly added one. Browse over to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista/ and you should be redirected to a trial sign-up page." - Link.

October 25, 2006

Foreword to Wireless Hacks, Second Edition

More than just a foreword to Wireless Hacks, Second Edition (by Rob Flickenger and Roger Weeks) Glenn Fleishman's praise of the book reads like paean to the maker/hacker spirit in general:

Wireless Hacks feels more like a device constructed by the love child of The Professor from Gilligan's Island and Mr. Spock: it beeps, it twitters, there are coconut shreds, and then, surprisingly, it produces a glass of tea out of thin air or transports several people to geosynchronous orbit. ... Wireless Hacks isn't about breaking technology to serve your needs. Rather, it's about bending it. So much of today's wireless networking hardware, software, and firmware has been carefully tailored to suit what the manufacturer or service provider feels you are entitled to do with it. But we own the tech and, for unlicensed networks, we own the airwaves. Wireless Hacks stands up, raises its hand, and says, "Excuse me, I don't buy into your world view."

Fleishman concludes that the book "could as easily been titled It's My Equipment, Dammit," which we like to think is true of all Hacks books and every issue of MAKE.

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