Let's pretend someone didn't know how to do that on an android. How would you explain it to them?
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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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.
Excellent explanation, thank you. Never knew what that difference was.
Yeah, recently I was on school wifi and it kept bothering me to log in and figured I needed to switch to per network or it would bother me everytime to sign into the captive portal.
Thanks for asking the question! I've never needed to know it, and I've done enough android tinkering that I'm fairly sure I could find it quite easily if needed, but I enjoy my social media being peppered with bits of learning wherever possible. I'm a big fan of ambient curiosity
Same here. Thanks :)
I think per connection is a GrapheneOS thing unless I'm wrong
On stock (Pixel) Android, if you enable Developer Options, there is a setting under Networking called "Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization" that randomizes the MAC per connection for networks that have randomization enabled.
Yeah, on Android 12 I can only choose between "randomized MAC" and "phone MAC". Doesn't specify if it's randomized per network or connection, but I'd guess it's per network.
Graphene just changed it to be enabled by default
But maybe they hat this feature earlier than AOSP
Samsung's OneUI does this by default for all connections .
Just google it you dumb piece of shit - Stack overflow user
Marked as duplicate
Thanks, I figured it out and got free food as a bonus!!!
Doesn't share solution
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
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?
Are there airports that still do this? Every airport I've been to in the last decade has had free Wi-Fi.
Your airport wifi doesn't ask for your email, phone number, bank number of your life savings, etc?
No. Where are you that it asks you for info?
The bank number for life savings was a joke but for some reason they wanted me to verify (I didn't btw)
This comes back to bite you when you purchase in-flight wifi which is tied to your MAC address. Make sure to disable that option for the in-flight access point!
on an AA flight I was recently on, they gave out free 20 mins of internet for watching a 15s ad, but this was once per device type of deal. In this case, turning on randomized mac addresses meant I get free inflight wifi for the entire flight!
Tragic airplane crash: Over 2700 suspected dead due to airplane data log
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?
I mean yeah, but in this case you want to make the routers job of shutting you out more difficult.
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.
I spoofed my MAC once when I went to a router page of a hotel and it said it was logging the request
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
Didn't know you could spoof a mac address
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.