Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Yeah. Twenty years ago. I worked for two ISPs over the years. At both of them the test accounts for support to use were unmonitored accounts due to how many places they were used and logged in by. In both cases I simply put those login details into my home setup and got free internet for probably about three years. Before that some friends got a un/pw file from a university and decrypted a few hundred names and passwords for accounts which gave free dialup access to students. Again multiple logins seemed allowed so the only person losing was the uni/isp. Used to be able to pull about ~14gb a month through a dialup connection. Probably via napster, kazaa and soulseek, I can't remember if torrents were a thing back then.

In the U.S. during the 90's, there were free ISP dial-up trial CD's everywhere, especially in retail checkout lanes. You were free to take as many as you wanted which was great because each CD had a unique code for the trial period offered.

After installing the providers software and creating a free email address, you'd signup for a new account and get anywhere from 30 minutes to "thousands of hours" of dial-up internet access per CD, for free (not counting paying for a landline phone service). If you ran out, delete the account and start with a new one under a new code.

Nothing was required outside of generic info (name, address etc) which could be made up because there were no real verification checks.

So, this was more common when WEP encryption was used. You could just listen to the radio traffic of the given network and collect IVs which the encryption would leak. Once you had enough pieces you could reassemble the key and access the network. When WPA came out it was harder, but tools like pyrit and john the ripper helped, so long as you were able to capture the 4-way TCP handshake.

To actually see the networks, you would build biquad parabolic antennas from old DirecTV dishes people left behind. They were very directional high gain antennas that you would just target at someone's house. We'd also build cantennas from junk laying around. Those were interesting days.

Vodafone has a hotspot service here in Germany. All of their cable routers have a second wifi network everyone can use (unless you opt out).

When they introduced it, it had a big flaw: They stored the MAC address of your device in their database as authorized, but never deleted it.

Hypothetically speaking, you could pay for a month, cancel the service and then browse for over a year until they noticed you and kicked you out. 😆

But I would never do that, of course.

About 10 years ago, I just moved and my new neighbor had an open network. Problem was they were 2 houses away and across the street. I set up a tiny repeaters in my car with a battery pack and parked half way between us.

It worked surprising well for about 6 months.

Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren't so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

It's still possible to do this, and I'm still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven't done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.

Back in the WEP/WPS days it was easy enough to use aircrack-ng and get access to a network. Anything public is likely to be slow and probably no access to open ports or manage it in any way.

I'm paying ~$45 CAD/month for a symmetrical 500Mbps line and I think its worth it. I'd never share this with anyone I don't know because my name is on it, anything anyone does will come back to me.

A long time ago lived in an apartment and used an openwrt router and some can-tenas to connect to the leasing offices guest wifi. Worked okay for about a year. Made sure to limit my torrents to after business hours. Then i was able to buy my own service so retired the setup.

I'm currently broke enough that I just rely on the public Xfinitywifi signal and a relative's Xfinity login. If I need not-weird-captive-portal-internet for something, I bridge and rebroadcast the Xfinitywifi connection using my laptop.

Not exactly pirating but thought this might be a useful anecdote to share

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network... I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own "secured" network lol. I'm fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn't have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

I may or may not be using P2P devices to share my Internet with all my neighbors.

But I also paid to have the neighborhood wired with fiber for internet.

When I was living in a car I'd wardrive nightly to find Wifi. This was before Wifi was commonly available in public spaces, and household routers often used a default password or no password at all. I'd use it to pirate games and movies to keep myself entertained.

Later I moved into a 4 plex apartment and convinced the neighbors to share one Internet connection. We ran ethernet through walls and across the roof and split the bill.

Nope, I prefer being able to run my own network router, open/close my own ports, block ads on the network, hopefully get as much bandwidth as I can, etc. so it's usually better for me to subscribe to my own internet.

... But since you bring it up, coincidentally I currently live on a street with shops/restaurants on the main floor under me. And all their wifi networks are visible from my apartment... so technically yeah, if I go through the trouble of collecting all their wifi passwords I could just hang out on their networks for free internet. Internet probably wouldn't be great and not very private without a VPN but for free web browsing it should work.

There is freifunk in Germany they use Mesh Network -> Router > VPN to another Country so they dont get Problems by People pirating.

About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.

The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.

I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.

We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it's been a while), and because my modem wasn't registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn't last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)

There are a few towns that became their own internet providers b/c the big guys wouldn't bring them either any or adequate service and they realized they could do it themselves more cheaply. They had to fight anti-socialism propaganda and of course lobbying and disinformation campaigns from the big providers, despite the fact that they had no intention of ever going there.

In my previous home I was possibly using the wifi of my neighbors sometimes. Just for fun. Since they left the default password on it. I could even login into their router once on wifi. And open ports or whatever. That I didn't do.

I used to crack my neighbour's WEP secured Wifi back in the day.

NEVER SUBBED NEVER DONATED ADBLOCK ON STOLEN LAPTOP NEIGHBOURS WIFI MOMMAS HOUSE STOLEN SOLAR PANELS STOLEN SUN SOLAR ENERGY STOLEN WATER WHEEL NEIGHBOURS RIVER STOLEN HYDROELECTRIC PLANT CHARGING PHONE WITH WORK ELECTRICITY SHOWER IN BATHROOM SINK STOLEN FOOD FROM CAFETERIA STOLEN HAMSTER STOLEN HAMSTER WHEEL KINETIC ENERGY FREE ENTERTAINMENT

Kind of I guess. Didn't have home internet so I would park my car in a home depot parking lot with a laptop torrenting off the public wifi and then walk the rest of the way to work.

When I was in college, I rented a house just outside my budget and found I couldn't afford things like cable internet.

I had a wifi->ethernet bridge that was originally to connect my OG Xbox to a wifi network. I also had neighbors with Wifi using WEP encryption. An idea was born.

Was able to use aircrack-ng on my laptop to crack their WEP key in about 15 minutes. Plugged that key into my wifi->ethernet bridge, and then hooked that into my router. Bam, my whole house was online.

That worked for probably a year and a half.

I'm sharing an internet connection with my neighbors for these reasons. In germany, we have "freifunk" which is just what you're explaining I think. I would definitely love to maximize this though.

Not exactly, but when I was in student dorms, the day when the contract ended if you booked for next year you paid basically nothing and got the highest tier of speeds, I assume its a bug in their system or something because its only for that 1 day and they dont advertise it as a special offer.

About 20 years ago, there was only dial-up internet available in my street. My parents lived about 200 m away from me in another street, and they could get ADSL. So I set up a wireless bridge to them, and it worked surprisingly well after some tweaking. Kept it running for a few years, eventually got my own connection because one day my dad called me because he needed the router password. Turns out he was also sharing the connection with his neighbour who was running an internet radio station.

I did some wardriving a long time ago but never used those internet connections. And I shared my connection before and had a Freifunk router. With the neighbours not so much. I'm mostly nice to them and ask before borrowing their stuff.

I built a Pwnagotchi but I haven't cracked any of it's handshakes yet.