• Jamie
    51•1 year ago

    Last time I went on vacation, the hotel wifi wouldn’t let my laptop on for some reason, but my phone was fine. The portal to log in just wouldn’t come up on my laptop.

    So I took my phone off the wifi and just spoofed my phone’s MAC address on the laptop. Did that for the whole week I was there.

      • Jamie
        4•1 year ago

        What was incredibly strange about my situation was that it was initially a DNS problem, it couldn’t resolve the addresses tha tthe hotel wifi wanted it to get to for the portal. I double checked, and basic DNS queries were working, just not those ones.

        So I figured, I’ll go on my phone, grab the IP addresses it’s connecting to, stick those in my hosts file, and they’ll get resolved. Well, this worked for the first portal address, but the one it redirected to couldn’t be reached. Nothing I tried worked, so I had to do what I described above.

    • R0cket_M00seEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I did this once to get on Xbox live cause the Xbox doesn’t (or didn’t, idk I’m PC now) open the web portal for you to agree to.

      So I just changed my hardware address to my laptop’s after I went through the portal in a web browser.

      No problems. That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a network engineer. The fact that it worked was just so damn cool.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      If you’ve got a VPN running, it won’t work. Turned it off and the prompt came right up

  • @BigDaddySlimEnglish
    26•1 year ago

    This reminds me of college. Was downloading movie torrents on my laptop while in class, just made it so it wouldn’t go to sleep when you closed the lid. So the IT guys kept kicking me off, so I’d change my MAC and keep going. It got to the point where I did that so much that the IT guys were actually going around campus looking for whoever was doing it. Also I changed my MAC so much it fried the wifi card in my laptop to the point it needed replaced lmao. Good times.

    • @BrainIG
      15•1 year ago

      How it got fried? Was it running hot all the time?

      • @LunaCtld
        27•1 year ago

        Stupid guess: Maybe the changed mac is written to e.g. an EEPROM and it ran out of write cycles and bugged out then.

          • @BigDaddySlimEnglish
            5•1 year ago

            Yeah it was an older Win7 system and kinda shit hardware from Acer. Don’t think the wifi card was a brand I had ever heard of either.

  • tinsukE
    23•1 year ago

    Alt: it’s a simple spell but quite unbreakable.

  • @[email protected]
    20•1 year ago

    I’ll probably forget to check when I get home. Does anyone know if Android randomizes the MAC address on every disconnect/connect with the random MAC option enabled?

      • @grasib
        10•1 year ago

        Not by default. It remembers the MAC for each specific network. This is because sometimes you want to have specific device on the same IP all the time. The DHCP decides this via the MAC.

        If you want it truly randomised every time you need to turn on non persistent MAC randomisation in the developer option.

      • @LunaCtld
        4•1 year ago

        GrapheneOS does this by default as well.

        • KptnAutismus
          1•1 year ago

          my Fairphone 4’s android 12 does this too.

    • @MrWafflesNBaconEnglish
      19•1 year ago

      It still is if I’m correct but most operating systems have an option to spoof/randomize your MAC address

    • edric
      11•1 year ago

      It is, but there are ways to spoof it so your device presents a different one when connecting to a network.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      Not quite. I’m not really sure but I think the original idea actually was a fixed hardware address but I’m not sure if a lot of devices actually ever implemented it that way because it’s simpler (and cheaper) to control it in software. In modern (especially mobile) devices it’s actually a security requirement because with a fixed MAC address you could be tracked by other wifi devices.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      As the others said that is normally the case but nowadays most computers and mobiles have an option that randomize the MAC addresses on each connection.

      These MAC addresses are known as locally-administered address. They look like this:

      x2:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
x6:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
xA:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
xE:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

      And rarely like this:

      x3‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx
x7‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx
xB‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx
xF‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx‑xx
  • @[email protected]
    14•1 year ago

    I just spent a whole week trying to prevent mac spoofing on my small wisp network network… Still trying…