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

In Germany we have an initiative called Freifunk (roughly „Free Wireless Radio“). They are building free wifi mesh networks in larger cities. Their members use their ISP connection with special mesh network router software. The initiative collects donations to improve their infrastructure and fend off liability claims.

Edit: There has been a thread about Freifunk here already.

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.

Not pirated but my local cooperative ISP is offering to split the fiber connection with neighbors and give advice on how to do so.

We can even have two bills, two completely separated intense accesses on one fiber connection and they will split the bill in two, or three, or four (plus add a few euros for administrative fees)

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.

So here is what I do when I’m staying at my rented house near my college. I took a fiber connection from the ISP. But a friend of mine lives nearby he uses his landlords WiFi from the same ISP. From him I got the WiFi pass. And I discovered that that WiFi router uses admin1 as it’s admin password. So I got the ppoe username and password from it. The next month I didn’t paid the ISP bill so they suspended my internet connection. And put that ppoe username and password on my router. The ISP was calling me for two months to pay the bill but I didn’t. And somehow they stopped calling and I still have the fiber connection. It’s been over a year now and in still using it.

Once in WEP days, before smartphones. I was on vacation on this place without internet and I cracked someone’s wifi password to get internet. It was wild how easy was to crack Wi-Fi’s passwords.

A friend of mine used to live right above a McDonalds and used their free Wi-Fi all the time.

I know someone who does business IT where the ISP were trying to charge a huge amount to connect fibre to one of their sites. Thankfully, they had another site a few miles away that was already connected. They found it was cheaper to stick a pole on each building with an omnidirectional WiFi antenna. Apparently the speeds weren’t too bad even though ping often left a little to be desired.

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.

in dial-up times i tried to steal internet cafe’s account. my purpose was using cafe account at night after cafe closed. there was a program which one is showing password with ******. i put it in floppy disk then went to internet cafe. I put the floopy disk in place and heard different sound.i looked at and my disk fell into pc case. so there was not floppy disk drive on pc. after that day i sent my friend to bring back my floppy disk. cafe owner said “that hacker never come back here again”

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.

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.

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.

Back in the WEP/WPS days it was easy enough to use aircrack-ng and get access to a network. Anything public is likely to be slow and probably no access to open ports or manage it in any way.

I’m paying ~$45 CAD/month for a symmetrical 500Mbps line and I think its worth it. I’d never share this with anyone I don’t know because my name is on it, anything anyone does will come back to me.