pieartsy

illustrator, poet, ifiction writer


xeph
@xeph

if you post a picture of a funny nearby wifi name that's unique and been around for a few months or so, i can tell you the gps coordinates where you found it to within a few hundred feet.

if you aren't comfortable posting your approximate location, don't post the wifi name!

if you want to know how, then let me tell you about wigle


prophetgoddess
@prophetgoddess

mildly pleased that my extremely rare wifi name has the wrong location. though it is the only one in the entire country. it has the city right but it's many miles away from where i currently live and several blocks away from where i used to live.

in an episode of @animeisforjerks that will go up at the start of next month we talk about cyberstalking, because there's a really hilarious cyberstalking scene in odd taxi, and i brought up the fact that a sufficiently motivated attacker could basically always figure out where you live if you post on social media at all. opsec1 is a lot like the locks on your house. the lock doesn't keep people out, it keeps out anyone insufficiently motivated to get into your house. if the government or the yakuza or whatever wants to be in your house badly enough, there's honestly not much you can do to stop them. we all get to live with the illusion of privacy because for most of us there's nobody that motivated who wants to hurt us or steal our stuff.


1: god i hate that term, when will computer nerds stop pretending to be the military


pieartsy
@pieartsy

opsec is important for certain spaces not made of computer nerds or the military. I think computer nerds should just stick to "net safety" or "web hygiene" as their term of choice for "privacy on the internet". like what operation are you securing dweeb, linux?


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @xeph's post:

theres been a game of thrones reference ssid near every apartment ive lived in and hotel ive stayed in in this city. none of them are on wigle though

i'm curious what'd be the opsec pros and cons of renaming your wi-fi SSID "xfinitywifi", which has 18,851,957 noted instances and counting.

one thing is more randos would mistakenly be trying to connect to your network.

back in extremely the day I used wigle to write a PC app GPS substitute

before, y'know, phones had GPS you could just use, or you could have your phone triangulate you through either towers or wifi on-device

but more to the topic, there is a lot of stuff people just don't realize gives information about themselves away, and I'm not sure there's a good way to resolve it :(

Okay, going to add "rename wifi" to the checklist of "things to do when moving".

Though that won't change the router's MAC address. Damn; better upgrade that to "get new wifi equipment".

Not that wigle would be all that useful at correlating my old and new addresses from the unique SSID; it doesn't know the new location yet despite it being over four years, and it places the old location on two spots on nearby busy roads where I guess someone once got a tiny bit of signal.

I have to say, this is quite fascinating. I know someone who's into privacy things and he might find this interesting, if he hasn't found it yet. But dang, our wifi name is pretty unique. I wonder if anyone's found it yet.