Fucking with Thieves (or: Do NOT Steal my Wifi)

ɹǝʌǝuƃǝ ıs ɐ pısɥ qǝsʇ sǝɹʌǝp ɔolp

Years back, when I installed my first Wifi access point at home, encryption was not generally supported by all devices.  As a result I basically ran the thing with no access control whatsoever.  After a while I discovered that basically all my neighbors were using my Wifi as free Internet which annoyed me to no end.

These days, WPA2 access control and encryption is supported by just about any device, so it is not as big an issue as it used to be.  My latest access point have the option of creating an unencrypted "guest" network and this inspired me to do a bit of delayed revenge on the Wifi thieves.

I won't go into long technical details here, but in short what I did was to create a guest network that is basically isolated from everything except that it does allow web browsing through a transparent proxy.  This proxy will pass normal pages through without any modification, but it will flip images upside-down.  Unfortunately this trick only works on "normal" web pages.  Encrypted pages (https) can't be directed through a transparent proxy.  The results are quite hilarious really.

First of all - don't say I didn't warn you.  This is how the "open" access point appear on my netbook:

I don't think any devices will automatically connect to an open access point, so in most cases if anybody use this network, they actually asked their laptop/netbook/phone to connect to a network called "DoNotStealMyWifi" as a deliberate act.

So, how is the result.  Well - most sites are still somewhat browseable.  CNN:

BBC:

IWDP (IMDB upside-down):

On mobile phones it gets even better.  Here's a few shots from my Samsung:

I get loads of users on this open network, but with the exception of one, they don't stay very long :)  The one exception is some iPhone user who is connected almost 24x7.  I can only guess what goes on in that guys head.  Perhaps he got used to flipping his phone upside-down?  As I mentioned earlier - all access is blocked except normal http browsing.

Last, but not least, I can not take credits for this idea (even if this is one I wish I could take credit for).  I got the original idea from: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html, so all credit for the idea goes to the author of that page!