• radix@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    In general, I thought IP addresses are mutable while MACs stay the same, and I thought that’s why the outside world uses IPs to identify networks while routers inside a network use MACs to identify specific devices. If you can change your MAC arbitrarily, doesn’t that risk making the router’s job more difficult? Why not just assign yourself a different internal IP?

    • ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Changing your MAC will make older messages undeliverable, but that just means the connection will be momentarily interrupted until you establish new connections after re-connecting to the WiFi.

      Why not just assign yourself a different internal IP? Because a. the router probably wants to assign you one itself via DHCP; and b. the router isn’t looking at your IP address to lock you out; it’s looking at your MAC address.

      If your IP address is where in cyberspace you are, a MAC address is who you are. If you want to fool the bouncer, change your name, not your address.

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Let’s pretend someone didn’t know how to do that on an android. How would you explain it to them?

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
      5·
      1 year ago

      On android when you go to the wifi settings you’re currently connected to there should be a setting for randomizing mac address per connection or per network. If you change it to per connection, once you disconnect and reconnect your mac address should change. On per network, it will randomly generate the mac address for the first connection and keep that address for that wifi forever.

    • Steeve@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Just google it you dumb piece of shit - Stack overflow user

      Marked as duplicate

  • jetsetdorito@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    fun fact, an early iPhone jailbreak would always change the phones wifi mac to the same address, so there was a meme for a while that if you had a jailbroken iPhone you couldn’t use airport wifi

    • cordlesslamp@lemmy.today
      1·
      1 year ago

      Why would anyone do that? If there’s 2 jailbreak iphones on the same network then non of them would have internet access due to IP conflict?

  • fidodo@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    Are there airports that still do this? Every airport I’ve been to in the last decade has had free Wi-Fi.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I had them most sophisticated hotel/resort wifi capture page I’ve ever seen them other week. It had you register on the wifi using your room number and booking email, then it gave you 10 slots that you put Mac addresses into. I couldn’t imagine how many people I bet never figured out how to use it lol

    • Corbin@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Most consumer-grade NICs have a default MAC address which is retrievable with device drivers, but delegate (Ethernet) packet assembly to the OS. If the OS asks the NIC to emit a packet, then the NIC often receives the packet as a blob, DMA’d from main memory, and emits the bytes as octets. Other NICs do manage packet assembly, but allow overwriting the default MAC address. By the time I was learning Linux, we had GNU MAC Changer available in userland with the macchanger command, and many distros have configuration for randomizing or hardcoding MAC addresses upon boot.

      I want to say that this is all because olden corporate network management policies could require a technician to replace a NIC without changing the MAC address, but more likely it is because framing and packet assembly was not traditionally handed to a second controller, and was instead bit-banged or MMIO’d by the CPU.