And no, I’m not talking about pirating on the internet, I’m talking about getting your internet connection to the outside world without paying or having a subscription or license. Something like a mesh network with your neighbors with the exit node being one person’s high-speed fiber line, or even an exit node through a free public wifi network that you’ve hidden a little repeater device within range of… something like that could be interesting. I’ve been thinking lately of a world where decentralized networks become more common, and where people can freely use the internet without paying an ISP. What are your thoughts?

  • Bags@piefed.social
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • albert180@piefed.social
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      1 month ago

      Or he believes in sharing his internet like the Freifunk People do.

      Not everyone who is sharing something for free with you is a moron you’re taking advantage of. Pretty disgusting worldview

      • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        They said “pretty sure”, not certain. Statistically, they were right, until routers started shipping with “secured” wifi settings by default. Nowadays, its the reverse.

        • Bags@piefed.social
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          1 month ago

          It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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    1 month ago

    NEVER SUBBED NEVER DONATED ADBLOCK ON STOLEN LAPTOP NEIGHBOURS WIFI MOMMAS HOUSE STOLEN SOLAR PANELS STOLEN SUN SOLAR ENERGY STOLEN WATER WHEEL NEIGHBOURS RIVER STOLEN HYDROELECTRIC PLANT CHARGING PHONE WITH WORK ELECTRICITY SHOWER IN BATHROOM SINK STOLEN FOOD FROM CAFETERIA STOLEN HAMSTER STOLEN HAMSTER WHEEL KINETIC ENERGY FREE ENTERTAINMENT

  • migo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.de
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    28 days ago

    way back in the early days of Wifi (802.11B was the cutting edge magic future technology) I had a large antenna hooked up to my laptop PCMCIA wifi card and could pick up some open networks from a few neighbours away. I used to set it up and leave winmx running on my laptop to download all sorts of garbage.

    My home internet at the time was up-to 512Kbps satellite downlink (usually around 200k and lots of packet loss and very high ping) with a ~56k dial up uplink which was also the failover when the satellite was too weak, so it was very asymmetrical and unreliable.

    This is semi-rural Australia in 1999/2000 and was the best we could get until we got a 3G connection that usually got 1.5meg down and 500k up on a weak HSPA connection, that place didn’t get 8/1 ADSL a couple of years later around 2005/6. A couple of streets away there were already on cable and better DSL lines were available so I assume I was connecting to one of those.

    Over the weak long range Wifi connection with a makeshift “cantenna” that probably wasn’t quite right I usually got around 250k symmetrical if I recall correctly, which was really nice compared to the satellite link despite the lower maximum speed.

  • katy ✨@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • Tiberius@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • 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.

  • couldbealeotard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    30 days ago

    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.

    • SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      30 days ago

      I miss the days when people would just leave their wifi networks open. It was a godsend when moving into a new apartment and waiting on the cable company.

    • invertedspear@lemmy.zip
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      29 days ago

      I could have been that neighbor. For many years I was a WiFi communist and intentionally kept my AP open. I depended on free WiFi to get through college so I provided free WiFi. Then I got a cease and desist from my ISP for someone pirating a shit ton of porn. Like the list was about 10 full length pornos. Had to lock it down after that. I’ve considered making some deals with my neighbors to extend my mesh network into their house in exchange for space in their driveway, but haven’t gotten around to it.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    1 month ago

    I did some wardriving a long time ago but never used those internet connections. And I shared my connection before and had a Freifunk router. With the neighbours not so much. I’m mostly nice to them and ask before borrowing their stuff.

  • XXIC3CXSTL3Z@lemmy.ml
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    25 days ago

    That’s a freaky ass idea. I believe you can use the router to spoof or some shi but that was back in wep most use wpa2 so idfk brah but I like the way your brain thinks hehe I was literally asking the same thing not too long ago

  • cestvrai@lemm.ee
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    30 days ago

    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.

  • Arkhive (they/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      30 days ago

      I want to do this more my neighborhood. How’s it going for you and how are you getting started?

      • Arkhive (they/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        30 days ago

        See my reply to the other comment under mine. Though I’ll add I feel like I “got started” when I met a bunch of local amateur radio operators and we all got chatting about long distance, wireless data transfers, which would add a lot of resilience to a mesh system.

    • NeonKnight52@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      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?

      • Arkhive (they/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        30 days ago

        I’ve “started” but only so far as working on my home lab/server and home network. In theory if I get everything setup in advance, it’s as simple as getting some high gain WiFi antennas and getting other people to put their routers in bridge mode and configuring them to extend my network.

        That being said, I am building out my home server with this goal in mind. An effective mesh network will have multiple devices hosting redundant instances of all the services, and the more devices doing that the more resilient the network is. To that end I’ve taken to learning NixOS for the reproducibility. Because your system is declared in a single file, and hardware specific config is separated from that, I can turn any device into a node in the mesh simply by installing NixOS and pulling the config of an existing node.

        Eventually I’d love to basically build my own routers from single board computers and high gain antennas that I can just give to people. Basically a plug and play, preconfigured device that will pickup the existing mesh, or create a new origin node if not in range.

        The super long term dream or goal of this would be to include a very long range, slower connection between origins to trickle feed content changes. Depending on the dystopia we end up in, this could be done with crazy strong WiFi signals, radio, LoRa, or even (inspired by factorial logistics robots) gliders or drones that are themselves carrying mesh network nodes and fly over bubbles of mesh networks.

        It’s all kind of a pipe dream, but I’m at least educating myself for a time where more people begin to realize the World Wide Web as we know it is crumbling.

        • www2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          29 days ago

          I have 15 years at go the same idea (including the balloons) and current i looking in to this mostle about the iprange. For the hardware you need to look to the youtuber tomazzaman that create there own router.

  • RagingHungryPanda@piefed.social
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    30 days ago

    First 6 months of marriage (first one, late 2010), we found an open wifi connection in our apartment complex and used that to our hearts content. This was when some people still didn’t understand why securing your wifi was necessary.

    • Psythik@lemm.ee
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      30 days ago

      I miss the early days of WiFi, when routers were unsecured by default. If you lived in the city or suburbia, you were pretty much guaranteed free wifi.

      Back in the 2000s I lived with my grandma for awhile, and even though she had internet, I would use the wifi from a few houses down. I only got 2 bars and was limited to 1.5Mbps, yet it was still over 5x faster than her 256Kbps DSL line.