How mean is Harry?

"your connection was interrupted" , "a network change has been detected"
These usually mean that you lost your internet connection and the modem has been allocated a new IP-address by the ISP.


I get this all the time in Spain, where the modem in the country uses the WCDMA network for fast (landline) telephone and internet. Every time the radio base is overloaded/interference/lightning/etc... the modem gets thrown off the network, goes into "roaming" mode, then finds and connects to another radio base. It then gets a new IP address in the bargain and "a network change has been detected".

If there is some ongoing work in your area (eg. changing from cable to fibre) then this can be normal. If it is via the WCDMA network then this is always normal.

BR Harry

Hi,
more often when i navigate on the net i get a message like "your connection was interrupted , e network change has been detected " on a blank screen . After a while the new page opens , or what i clicked on . What could this mean ? I never had this for 5 years at this provider and from at least 2 months it's happening

The "internet hacking" is still happening in Sweden, but now I have several older smartphones, all with fake and plausible-looking operator SSID names.

Here in Spain, a neighbour went into our property while we were away, copied the modem data (UN and PW), and then set up a WiFi repeater so that it covered his property, and another neighbour. To make it worse, he plugged it into an outlet outside our garage so we paid for the electricity.

I have changed the modem access info and set up a 2Mb/s "open network" for the neighbours. They do supply us with firewood, and feed the cats when we are away. But here we are out in the country and there is no other Internet source. I had to use a 120-element Yagi on the roof to get -70dBm into the modem.

But the Swedish hackers get nothing for free - just an easy-to-hack access-point with no Internet connection (at the moment 9 of them :-)

BR Harry

did this happen now days  ?   we have internet even in the woods . 
Why to steel internet from neighbor , it' crazy . I also shared internet with my neighbor , but it was an arrangement  , we payed fifty/fifty the subscription bill.

You sure don't seem to have much luck with neighbours, do you?
We had a reverse problem when wemoved to our current place, about 7 years back.
Everyone and their dog has a WiFi set-up at home. Our connection was up and down more times than a whore's knickers. I got a WiFi analyser for my android phone and dicovered about three carrirs on the same channel, with one carrir stronger than ours in our home.  I found just one channel that wasn't used by anyone else, so I set our channel to that. No problems since.

Hi Ruud,
No, it is the neighbour in Spain who diverted the flood dyke so it poured on the side of our house.
BR Harry


PS - I know www.sm0vpo is offline. We have a power cut to the whole area.

Was it the neighbour we know from 'the fence'?!

Hello again Ruud,
No, you are not a bad person. Let me explain a bad person:

In Spain, when we were in Sweden, the neighbour went into our property, into the covered terrace and took a photograph of the 3G Internet and telephone modem. From this he got the SSID and also the default password. He then bought himself a "WiFi Extender" and connected it to our network so that our WiFi was rebroadcast to cover his property. To add insult to injury, he plugged the WiFi-Extender instrument in our power outlet under the car port so that we were even paying for his electricity!

Not enough! When he configured his WiFi extender he chose the same SSID and password that he got from our router, which means that when we returned our own connection was receiving two WiFi connections, on the same channel, same password, and with the same IP address range. This meant that we could not use our own internet in the bedroom when equal distances between the two access points.

Still not enough? No, on his pirated WiFi connection he was running two seperate Internet-based TV boxes and taking 5MBs bandwidth. We only have 2-up and 10-down and he was using it all. Maj-Lis was unable to even call me on Skype as the network was so slow.

Still not enough? He was running Bit-torrent with unlimited down speed to download pirated videos.

I changed the channel, SSID and password. I then opened an "open network" for him with a 2.5M-down and 0.5M-up connection (25% of our capacity) and he came and complained that his internet is too slow, almost as if he had a right to our full bandwidth.

Here in Sweden I know that there are a few guys downloading stuff and hacking into WEP networks to get the bandwidth in this living area. The problem with that is the router owner in Sweden takes full legal responsibility for all traffic on it, and this includes file-sharing, illegal porn and any other "internet abuse". Since I have incoming ports open (for my homepages) there is always a risk.

In Spain it is a little different because I have an open channel so I can show that I have external access, and my firewall logs record the MAC address, source and destination IP-addresses of all activity.

I don't mind sensible users, but one of the main reasons for hacking here is to hide yourself behind someone elses network.

But when I read your story I put that in the class of "sensible user".

----------------------

A few years ago I found a network that was unprotected, and I cold see the unprotected computer and even the online printer! So I registered the printer on my laptop and printed a message:

-- Hi, this is Harry in the London office. Please let me know where this printer is as I have a 250 page document to print ---

The following day the network was still open, so I took an Outlook mail, opened it with a binary editor and printed the page on his printer. The mail was an extremely personal letter from the (male) Swedish prime minister to his boyfriend. The following day the network was protected :-)

Ok, I have to go now. Gotta be at work early in the morning.
Have fun, and thanks for the story. I thought it was relly interesting.

Best regards from Harry - SM0VPO

Well, I think that for a lot of people it is a challenge to get free internet!
Many years ago, when we used to have modems to connect to the internet, I had a computer with a build in wireless interface.
Of course, I couldn't use the wireless connection back then.
At a certain moment, I realized that the computer was installing updates, but I hadn't been connected to the internet for the last days...
So I tried to figure out what was going on.
It seemed that my computer had connected to a wireless access point in my neighbourhood!
(Protection wasn't a common issue at the time.)
The good thing was, that the wireless connection was very fast, much faster than my modem connection. So I decided that I could use the wireless connection (from one of my neighbours?) 'from time to time' to download larger files.
First I started to do this late in the evening. After I had used the wireless connection, I got into the setup of the wireless router, and erased the IP usage log. (Good thieves don't leave any traces...) As an extra service, I even did set the clock of the router to the correct time!
This went on for many months. At a certain moment, I couldn't connect to my favorite router anymore...
Did the owner move house or did they discover that I used their connection sometimes?
I will never know. But at that time, ADSL had become more common.
And after many months using a fast connection, I couldn't go back to my old and slow modem.
So yes, I am a bad person. Really bad...

Here is an interesting point that should spark some discussions, how ethical is it to cheat hackers?

www.sm0vpo.com is hosted on my own home broadband network using a Rapberry-PI. But when I look at the firewall (IPcop) I see that there are loads of attempts to connect. My WiFi finder sees about 70 networks in this housing estate, so there must be users out there trying to connect and get free WiFi, or possibly something more sordid?

I have an old 3G/4G router here, without a SIM card, so I put it online and changed the SSID to "Free WiFi", then set it up as an open network - no password (and no Internet).

This evening there were no less that 18 people connected to it, and over the past month the attempts to connect to my www.sm0vpo.com server via WiFi have fallen by about 75%. I also saw that the source and destination IP addresses of some of the connections were identical, but swapped. So it looks as if someone is trying to hack into other computers connected to this "honeypot".

My homepages worked without any crashes or WiFi attacks for the whole month I was away :-)

Perhaps I have a mean streak in me? What do you think?

Very best regards from Harry - SM0VPO