Lately a number of blogs posted comments on a very old post, dated 2006 about how to hack a commercial wireless, goes like this:
“I continued to try a couple other things, like checking if they eventually forgot some ports like 21 (ftp) or 110 (pop3). But no, all of them were properly blocked. After a lot of unsuccesfull attempts, I had some intuition telling me to check how they handle pictures. Without any hope of success I typed http://www.google.com/.jpg into my browser’s adress bar, and to my big surprise I saw the page you see when you follow the link right now. The next thing I typed in was: http://www.google.com/?.jpg but that didn’t work. But I went on, and found that url’s like http://www.google.com/search?.jpg worked like a charm. I found that I could easily visit sites like slashdot, google, or even this weblog, when adding a ?.jpg at the end of the url. The next logical step was to automate that. I downloaded greasemonkey.xpi?.jpg (*g*) and wrote a 4 line js script that would add ?.jpg to every link in a document. That way I was able to browse most sites without a hassle. Unfortunatly, I didn’t get to explore this vulnerbility much more, because I had to board the airplane, were I waited another 3 hours due to a mechanical failure – without wlan : /.”
What normally happens in a router with captive portal is, you have a firewall rule that redirects you to a local http server, this server gets a bunch of information about you, like ip address, mac address, url you tried to access and so on, then it displays a website so you can log in.
If this local web server or called application that redirects you is bugged, might help you get free access, but I really doubt this will work on any network, but I can’t talk about others, in Vex, this by far will not work.
Few weeks ago I was in Vancouver for a few meetings, while in this company that produces routers, they told me that they also offer a mail service that can come within the router, making absolute non-sense for me, I asked:
Q: “why?”
A: “Most ISPs in Canada blocks port 25″
*sigh*
Q: “Why?”
A: “They think this way they will block spam”
*sigh*
It’s incredible how from time to time you can hear incredible ideas like this, how come no one ever realized that blocking port 25 would reduce spam, uh? Because of this fantastic solution this company has to provide an alternative way for their clients email to be delivered successfully, then I ask you:
And suddenly after upgrading to 2.0, iPhone got boring. Almost all my applications came from installer which is now cydia and is basically empty. So why did I upgrade then? Well, I really wanted to have mobileme working, actually, I wanted to have wireless syncing of contacts and schedule, but apple is smart and didn’t add this resource to charge you with mobile me.
Fortunately it is free for the first 60 days, so I didn’t spend any money at all, and it is working well for me, differently from what people is saying, but if you have push enabled, it will eat your baterry live, so I had to turn it off and set it to fetch hourly or manual. If you really don’t care about using mobile me, don’t upgrade yet.
McDonald’s POS system are pretty simple, they have in their database all products, numbers, sides, with all possible configurations. When you start asking, the gentleman or lady in the cashier start hitting the right spot for what you ask in a touchscreen lcd monitor, whenever they choose something with multiple choice, a sub list appears, for example, when they hit number one, they have to choose the drink you want, and it can be sprite, coke, guaraná, juice, whatever, pretty simple and easy.
Some times I like to ask their top sunday with caramel and since it’s pretty big I like to balance it with extra caramel, the only problem is that the system is not configured with extra caramel, only chocolate and strawberry, but they do have caramel.
Guess what? Every time since the last few years they get stuck with this, either the product comes with the wrong flavor and they need to throw it in the trash or the cashier screams to the other side of the store:
“This extra chocolate is caramel!”
Said that, I have two questions:
How complicated is for someone to add this variable to the system?
We have around 600 stores in the country, how come no one realized this yet?
