Blocking a computer from a wireless router.

... I did go through the manual for my router, which is why I posted here. My old router only supported IP filtering, but not MAC filtering. Quite obviously, IP filtering is entirely useless... and comming up with the name "MAC filtering" isn't naturally intuitive unless you've been exposed to it before. Thus the request for someone who *had* been exposed to it, to give me a suggestion of what to try... i.e. give me the term. I figured out the rest, and it's not like I'm being rude about it, or posting on a forum unrelated to wireless security, so I don't see any reason for you to return such a sentiment. I wasn't going to comment the first post you made, but seriously.....

Anyway, I got a new router, and MAC filtering works perfectly. It doesn't need to be amazingly secure, it's just to combat an ignorant roommate schenario. I'm pretty sure WPA encryption keeps most other people out.

Thanks aga> Bill Kearney wrote:

... I did go through the manual for my router, which is why I posted here. My old router only supported IP filtering, but not MAC filtering. Quite obviously, IP filtering is entirely useless... and comming up with the name "MAC filtering" isn't naturally intuitive unless you've been exposed to it before. Thus the request for someone who *had* been exposed to it, to give me a suggestion of what to try... i.e. give me the term. I figured out the rest, and it's not like I'm being rude about it, so I don't see any reason for you to return such a sentiment. I wasn't going to comment the first post you made, but seriously.....

Anyway, I got a new router, and MAC filtering works perfectly. It doesn't need to be amazingly secure, it's just to combat an ignorant roommate schenario. I'm pretty sure WPA encryption keeps most other people out.

Thanks aga> Bill Kearney wrote:

i wonder if bored teenagers are really that good.

i mean, i am sure some of them are but i imagine most ppl probabaly dont know how to do stuff like that.

On 14 Nov 2006 10:25:12 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

They don't need to -- automated tools are readily available on the Internet.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

Well, how would you like your wireless access point converted into a non-TCP/IP game hub to connect a bunch of 13 year olds in the neighborhood? I couldn't even see their traffic because none of it went to the internet. That's exactly what they managed to do a few years ago with my access point. As John Navas mentioned, it's not their abilities, but their access to scripted tools.

Well, perhaps another example. My office is near the end of a dead end road near the San Lorenzo River. The local deadbeats, vagabonds, winos, bums, homeless, etc tend to illegally park their campers near the turnaround. Despite the trappings of poverty, many of these urban campers have laptops with wireless (probably stolen). They find my office access point and proceed to use it for their personal VoIP phone system. Initially, I had the access point setup for public access (no encryption) but that became a problem as too many of them were using it for massive downloads. So, I turned on WEP64 encryption (because I had a bunch of Orinoco Silver cards that would only do WEP64). About a week later, they had the encryption key and were back in business. It was interesting watching them break in. So, here we have a class of individuals, with obvious mental and emotional problems, with supposidly no resources, cracking WEP keys.

I switched to WPA and ended the problem.

Incidentally, you might want to get the shift key on your keyboard repaired.