Let's pretend someone didn't know how to do that on an android. How would you explain it to them?
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fun fact, an early iPhone jailbreak would always change the phones wifi mac to the same address, so there was a meme for a while that if you had a jailbroken iPhone you couldn't use airport wifi
This comes back to bite you when you purchase in-flight wifi which is tied to your MAC address. Make sure to disable that option for the in-flight access point!
on an AA flight I was recently on, they gave out free 20 mins of internet for watching a 15s ad, but this was once per device type of deal. In this case, turning on randomized mac addresses meant I get free inflight wifi for the entire flight!
Why's it need to be temporary, anyway? It's an airport. Nobody's sticking around.
You haven’t “flown” recently, have you?
Why, did they add a week-long quarantine in baggage check? It's an airport. The whole point is to show up and leave. Even if the wait lasts longer than the flight.
If your ass in there longer than 24 hours, the wifi should be considered an apology.
Long time ago, it was probably due to overcrowding. Very easy to get shit quality of service once it hits a certain time of day.
But with advances in wireless technology (backhaul, 5Ghz, MIMO, …) I think that’s no longer the case.
Your airport wifi doesn't ask for your email, phone number, bank number of your life savings, etc?
Usually it asks for an email, but you can just input a fake one.
It's me toast@fake.com
for a lot of captive portals I type random crap like stevejobs@apple.com or jdjdidneiejdjeksneidnei@gmail.com
Didn't know you could spoof a mac address
Most consumer-grade NICs have a default MAC address which is retrievable with device drivers, but delegate (Ethernet) packet assembly to the OS. If the OS asks the NIC to emit a packet, then the NIC often receives the packet as a blob, DMA'd from main memory, and emits the bytes as octets. Other NICs do manage packet assembly, but allow overwriting the default MAC address. By the time I was learning Linux, we had GNU MAC Changer available in userland with the macchanger command, and many distros have configuration for randomizing or hardcoding MAC addresses upon boot.
I want to say that this is all because olden corporate network management policies could require a technician to replace a NIC without changing the MAC address, but more likely it is because framing and packet assembly was not traditionally handed to a second controller, and was instead bit-banged or MMIO'd by the CPU.
Some devices, like Android, do this automatically. By default they have randomized mac enabled.
I use this to make MACs for my VMs and virtual NICs. The 00:16:3E prefix means it's Xen virtualization, so change this part as needed.
#!/usr/bin/python
# macgen.py script to generate a MAC address for guests on Xen
import random
def randomMAC():
mac = [ 0x00, 0x16, 0x3e,
random.randint(0x00, 0x7f),
random.randint(0x00, 0xff),
random.randint(0x00, 0xff) ]
return ':'.join(map(lambda x: "%02x" % x, mac))
print (randomMAC())
Use
$ macgen.py
00:16:3e:17:ed:b1
GrapheneOS has per connection MAC which can be useful in situations like this
In general, I thought IP addresses are mutable while MACs stay the same, and I thought that's why the outside world uses IPs to identify networks while routers inside a network use MACs to identify specific devices. If you can change your MAC arbitrarily, doesn't that risk making the router's job more difficult? Why not just assign yourself a different internal IP?
I mean yeah, but in this case you want to make the routers job of shutting you out more difficult.
Changing your MAC will make older messages undeliverable, but that just means the connection will be momentarily interrupted until you establish new connections after re-connecting to the WiFi.
Why not just assign yourself a different internal IP? Because a. the router probably wants to assign you one itself via DHCP; and b. the router isn't looking at your IP address to lock you out; it's looking at your MAC address.
If your IP address is where in cyberspace you are, a MAC address is who you are. If you want to fool the bouncer, change your name, not your address.
I spoofed my MAC once when I went to a router page of a hotel and it said it was logging the request
I had them most sophisticated hotel/resort wifi capture page I've ever seen them other week. It had you register on the wifi using your room number and booking email, then it gave you 10 slots that you put Mac addresses into. I couldn't imagine how many people I bet never figured out how to use it lol
Are there airports that still do this? Every airport I've been to in the last decade has had free Wi-Fi.
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