lifehacker.com — No doubt you've got a home wireless network or you've connected to hotspots at the local coffee shop or airport?but are you getting the most out of your Wi-Fi? Whether you want to strengthen, extend, bridge, secure, sniff, detect or obscure your signal, today we've got our top 10 best Wi-Fi utilities and tweaks for the power wireless user
Oct 3, 2007 View in Crawl 4
biksOct 4, 2007
I like the hack...but nothing clever ever comes out of the mouths of nerds doing patter behind a desk. Ever.
cycophukOct 4, 2007
The store next to where I work has Wi-Fi and up until 3 weeks ago, I could piggy back their bandwidth. My laptop detects their signal, but won't connect to it. It tries to, but doesn't. Is there anything I can do to use their signal again?
kitsune818Oct 4, 2007
I've got a version 5, it won't run any of the third party stuff. Looks nice, but I can't justify replacing my perfectly functional router. I would like some bandwidth usage monitoring though, like Tomato has.
kitsune818Oct 4, 2007
Methinks anyone who can't figure that out for themselves probably shouldn't play with microwave amplifiers. There is a reason they require a license, you know.
Closed AccountOct 4, 2007
freeantennas.com has one of those called a EZ-10, apparently their software is showing the parabolic gets 12db instead. The EZ-10 sure is a lot easier to make.
hurricaneMar 5, 2008
I picked one up for $30 on eBay, a WRT54GS v2, full version of DD-WRT with extras runs on it rock solid.The only way to brick your router is to be an idiot and not follow the directions, such as not returning to factory settings before upgrading or interupting power to the router while upgrading...or the biggest of them all... installing the wrong version of DD-WRT on the wrong router such as the older standard size release on a newer lower memory router.
hurricaneMar 5, 2008
YEP, as of March 4th 2008 I can put together a rig of a DWL-G650 (Atheros 5212) hardware hacked for external antenna, Commview for wireless with WEPKR and a $10 antenna and crack WEP in about 15 minutes. This whole rig working on Winblows XP (no linux hacking required) and costing about $40 if you use "special" versions of the software.
hurricaneMar 5, 2008
Yeah, but use a high quality password or hackers can run a bruteforce rainbow wordlist attack on your WAP.Limited but still possible to get in.
hurricaneMar 5, 2008
SSID hiding and MAC address restrictions put overhead on the processing and broadcasting of packets.This slows down your connection, of course so does WAP/WAP2.