Houseguests, technological literacy, and the goddamned wifi: a single chart

I would think that it probably involves the words “binary blob”…

I get the extreme end of this graph.
Maybe my situation is unique, but a houseguest I had a couple of years ago (whom I discovered to be a con-artist) jacked my modem to change my username and password.
Her claim? She was uncomfortable about using the “guest” login partition of my wi-fi. When asked why she didn’t simply connect straight to the modem with the 12-foot+ cable I had, there was no legitimate excuse, only deflection.

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Does this include guests who know how to find their device’s MAC address so i can add it to the router’s MAC filter? If you can’t find it then no internet for you!

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House… guests? Is… is that like some kind of way to say “cat” or “dog”? Why do they need wi-fi?

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CollarCam?

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My take was along the lines of “I’m sorry, but I can’t get on your wifi until you update your firmware.” In a security patching sense, and can’t being “refuse to.” (Yes, I’m that guy.)

Okay, not really true. I treat all networks as “hostile” to begin with, still…

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I was in a hotel a couple of years ago that served both a major university and its teaching hospital, and the campus IT department had decided to block VPNs, including at the hotel. I was with a very good VPN service at the time (that allowed a choice of protocols over a choice of ports), but couldn’t tunnel through. It was an impressive feat on the part of the IT guys, and I understand why they might do it for the campus network (eg, to keep students from torrenting), but it seemed a bit controlling for a hotel network.

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My usual fallback in those cases was a ssh tunnel to a ssh server that used port 443 – while it is detectable/blockable, I don’t recall ever having that one fail ('cept I don’t think that I have that server running anymore).

Port 443 is one of the first alternatives I tried. (I don’t know of one serious VPN that doesn’t let you choose 443 as an option.) I don’t know if IT was fully blocking 443 or somehow cleverly detecting that I was using it for a VPN tunnel instead of just secured email, since I didn’t try email from that connection.

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Are you sure it was the hotel? Maybe it was a guy down the hall with bandit ap. That’d be easy to do if the hotel had RJ45 jacks as well as wifi.

Smells like a Hilton brand hotel. Amiright?

They could print out a QR code and stick to the fridge.

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Or cross-stitch it.

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I know nothing about cross-stitch, but that strikes me as preternaturally precise.

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Here’s what I know: it’s pixels.

Cute, right? From this pattern shop I found randomly:

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That’s how I read it (and Cory’s addendum) too.
It made me feel a bit inadequate - I NEVER update my modem firmware, as I have some configuration done (for CCTV and and Xbox 360) that I’m afraid I would have to repeat and, uh, I forget how/am too lazy/have to wash my hair.

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