Episode: 554
Title: HPR0554: Wireless
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0554/hpr0554.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:56:59

---


Welcome to Hack of Public Radio, my name is Soak, and this is going to be a really quick
episode. A bit of our ground, my parents were visiting, so we decided to set up the wireless
instead of having them to invite them into the really messy computer and where we actually
pretty much hidden anything we didn't want them to see. Well, basically any boxes, books,
anything like that, just chucked in the room, figured, bring a laptop out, connect to
the wireless, boom, bobs your uncle. Actually, here's, but that's another story. So, I wanted
to put encryption on the wireless. Now, I've got no Lynxys, it's Lynxys B only wireless,
at a 2.11b or whatever the wireless format is I forget now. There's a B, not a G, not
a D or whatever. Anyway, it's a B, it's an old one, it's a B-E-F-W-1-1-S-4, I believe
it's the, excuse me, I believe it's the model number, failure or failing half, I'm
hate it actually because if I have wireless on, it, it, it, it, memory leak or something
it dies after a day or two, you have to reset the damn thing. Oddly enough, we had a wireless
Lynxys at work, we had exactly the same issue with, so one of the guys that actually said
there's an issue with Lynxys how they don't give very much memory for wireless, this
is what happens. But anyway, so, I went through, enabled security and I have three choices
with WEP, well okay, we know how easy that is to break. And WPA, just one, not two, pre-share
key or radius. Now, my understanding is that pre-shared key, if you put a group renewal
of 10 minutes, it makes it uncrackable, as long as you have a simple, I'm sorry, as long
as you don't have a simple password, if you have a strong enough password, yes there
are ways to break it, but the force, brute force, each separate letter. And if you have
more than like, come on, what are 16 codes in the password or something, as long as you
have any other 64 or whatever, the big number, basically the maximum you can have, then
it doesn't let you brute force it in time. And then because you've got the group renewal
every 10 minutes, it takes like 15 minutes to crack it, so every 10 minutes boom, new
key, and it gets around it. I don't know how to do that is, but I need security now,
set it, but so, you know, your mileage may vary. So anyway, I set up a big, long WPA-shared
key, it was 64 characters, not ask your anything, just upcase lowercase numbers, sorry, that
is asking, not hex, I mean. So we did all that, took my laptop out, which is running,
went to whatever the current one is, Lucid, isn't it? Running Lucid, and I set it up and
can connect, absolutely fine. Now Mrs. Zoke went and tried to connect with her netbook,
triply, and through windows, and it said, no, that's wrong, your password is the wrong
size. And I was a bit confused, because we put it on a flash drive for the password,
so you can just cut and paste, no, typos. And it said that I'd set up a 64 character password,
sorry, it didn't say that I had set up a 64 character password, but it said it had to be a 63
character ASCII or 64 character hex. And this meant she could not connect, now this is running,
windows XP on her triply. Now this is a bit weird, I really haven't gone into looking a huge
amount more, my business has been here, I've been a little busy. But I'm asking you a favor for
all the listeners, hecka public radio, both of you. I mean, all of you, what I would like you to do
is if you can try this, try this, now you're going to need windows machines. A little rusty on
exactly how VMware or VirtualBox or similar would work, but it's got to hook off the wireless
adapter that you have in the car running on the primary operating system, so I don't think of
VMware or a VirtualBox machine would work potentially. I'm not sure how that's going to work,
but it may not, because it may connect through your main offerings, with that's Linux,
then you're not going to be able to get through this. But I want you to try,
select a 64-character, upcase locate number, so ASCII-based password, and then see if you can connect
to the wireless, well first of all, let's see if it will let you do that. Secondly, see if you can
connect to it with a Windows PC, and then see if you can connect to it via Linux PC. If anyone's
going to Mac, please try a Mac and see if that will connect. Like I said, this is the one router,
one machine, one operating system, I couldn't do it on, but the error message I'm thinking is a
general XP message, and I'm assuming, again, assumption, mother of all, ups, so I'm assuming they
haven't really changed this, but try it and see what's going on, because it's a bit weird, but
if this is the case, you can put a 64-character ASCII password in, you can log out Windows
machines, which is kind of funny, and possibly Mac as well, depending on how they handle it,
which is really kind of weird, so go and try it and see what's going on,
and well let me know, put comments under the hack, public radio, go to Zodolog, send me feedback,
or all the blurb I'm about to say in my standard spiel output, but go and try it and let me know
what you find. Thank you for listening, if you want to give me any feedback, you can go to
zoke.org, that's x-ray oscarciloeco.oscaromio.gov, you can send me feedback through there,
or you can email me at zoxoroatgmail.com, that's x-ray oscarciloecocieraoscaromiouniform at gmail.com.
Thank you for listening to hack, public radio, HPR is sponsored by tarot.net, so head on over to
C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us here.