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
Why would anyone do that? If there's 2 jailbreak iphones on the same network then non of them would have internet access due to IP conflict?
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!
Tragic airplane crash: Over 2700 suspected dead due to airplane data log
Why's it need to be temporary, anyway? It's an airport. Nobody's sticking around.
Unless you're Tom Hanks
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.
It lasted 1 hour for me and if you've been to a busy airport you can be there for longer than that
Then why is it one hour?
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.
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.
Where is this setting?
Can't speak for other devices, but on my Samsung it's a network level setting in the "view more" section of the wifi network configuration.
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.
Fair point!
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 see! Thanks for the explanation! Didn't put two and two together to realize that the router basically reads MACs and writes IPs.
The router recognizes a device based on its MAC and assigns an IP address. Traditionally, the MAC stays the same, so you’re right. In this case, OP doesn’t want to be recognized by the (airport) router. There is software for spoofing the MAC address for most platforms. Changing the MAC address has recently become more popular due to privacy concerns and on some operating systems it’s supported out of the box.
That's pretty cool.
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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