Fun way to mess with wireless freeloaders….
Some people spend a lot of time finding ways to block the freeloaders from their wireless internet. Others find fun ways to mess with them…. They start off by settup up dhcpd.conf to carve out two subnets a “good” one with known mac addresses and an untrusted…. then the fun begins with some proxy side image manipulation. Either upside down images, blurry images, etc. I wonder why you don’t just take it a step further…. block images entirely and replace with a jpg of your choice. IF you have a very BUSY accesspoint with freeloaders – maybe you could even sell an ad…. or do a captive portal for the untrusted crowd that redirects through a page that says…. “Uploading personal data…. Please wait…. Credit Card info transfered…. browsing history transfered….. email history transfered…. My Documents in progress…” Of course, it would be actually doing this…
The sad thing is that I don’t know how many people would really pay attention and be concerned. “Boy my home page is taking a while to load… I wish that guy would get a decent download speed on his cable….” “What’s all that about uploading personal information?” “Probably just some technical browser update or something…”
The bottom line here that this SHOULD drive home to people is that if you use an unknown/untrusted wireless access point they can do JUST ABOUT anything to the information going through unless there is END TO END encryption. (That’s true for just about any network connection actually – it’s just that wireless gives so MANY more possibilities for mischief.)
Oh, and with regards to end to end encryption – it’s worth looking at your security certificates if there’s any failure to identify the authenticity.