My WiFi is ‘Secret Rebel Base’.

My neighbours have added ‘Jabba the Hub’, ‘Obi Lan Kenobi’, and ‘Red WiFi-ve Standing By’. This makes me happy.

Anyone else live in a neighbourhood that embraces this kind of WiFi silliness?

  • x00z@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Be safe guys. Because of SSID location mapping services it’s possible to pinpoint the location of many people in this thread.

    • Hossenfeffer@feddit.ukOP
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      1 day ago

      A lot of the SSIDs in this thread have been used multiple times in different locations. But you raise a valid point.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        17 hours ago

        I just fed a bunch of them I expected to be unique through a skyhook provider, all but one so far had at least dozens.

        • x00z@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Some people have posted a list of the SSIDs around them. What’s the chance some of those dozens also having one of the others nearby? Pretty low I’d say.

          There’s also the fact that you can use previously posted information by a user to narrow down the list. Let’s say an SSID is found 50 times, one in each US state, but the user posted in another thread what state they are in? You just narrowed down the list to a single SSID.

          Being safe online is a bunch of things together. You just need to piss of the wrong one to have it all combed trough. Posting the name of an SSID close to you is like posting your street name without the city or country name.

    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      Because of SSID location mapping

      People really out there mapping SSID’s? I fail to understand how that data is at all valuable, changing an SSID takes seconds and a gram of brain power.

      • signalsayge@infosec.pub
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        4 hours ago

        Very few people actually change their SSID. The bigger point is that, considering sites like Wigle.net exist and the Google Street view cars were designed to capture all SSID data (they hired the guy who made NetStumbler, a popular open source SSID scanning tool in the early 2000’s), it’s trivial to get within a few hundred feet with just a few SSID’s in an area. When your neighbor has an SSID of Comcast-12345 (aka random string), there is probably only one location that has your SSID and the Comcast one in the same location. You can change your SSID every day, but your neighbors probably don’t change theirs.

      • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Oh thats easy, android uses ( or at least used it in the past ) these services for location.
        Android will first try gps to get your location. However, gps needs direct connection to a satellite and can easily be either turned off or not working correctly.
        It then tries to triangulate your location using cell towers and their location, which gives a rough estimate on your location.
        Then it scans SSID’s that are near to hone down some more on your location, and its this step that needs that data.

        Edit: it used to also scan, and save, SSID names with a rough estimate location to fill and update this database. I say used to, cause thats how it worked circa 2009, so idk how it works nowadays