I plugged into ethernet (as wifi w/captive portal does not work for me). I think clearnet worked but I have no interest in that. Egress Tor traffic was blocked and so was VPN. I’m not interested in editing all my scripts and configs to use clearnet, so the library’s internet is useless to me (unless I bother to try a tor bridge).

I was packing my laptop and a librarian spotted me unplugging my ethernet cable and approached me with big wide open eyes and pannicked angry voice (as if to be addressing a child that did something naughty), and said “you can’t do that!”

I have a lot of reasons for favoring ethernet, like not carrying a mobile phone that can facilitate the SMS verify that the library’s captive portal imposes, not to mention I’m not eager to share my mobile number willy nilly. The reason I actually gave her was that that I run a free software based system and the wifi drivers or firmware are proprietary so my wifi card doesn’t work¹. She was also worried that I was stealing an ethernet cable and I had to explain that I carry an ethernet cable with me, which she struggled to believe for a moment. When I said it didn’t work, she was like “good, I’m not surprised”, or something like that.

¹ In reality, I have whatever proprietary garbage my wifi NIC needs, but have a principled objection to a service financed by public money forcing people to install and execute proprietary non-free software on their own hardware. But there’s little hope for getting through to a librarian in the situation at hand, whereby I might as well have been caught disassembling their PCs.

The red padlock (at a cafe)

The captive portal of a cafe simply rendered a red padlock on with a line through it. Essentially, it was apparently telling me I am being denied access arbitrarily without using any words. There was no other screen before that. Immediately after wifi handshaking Android’s built-in captive portal detection app just went straight to a padlock. I have never been in that cafe in my life and never use my device maliciously.

Showed the screen to the staff who said “works for me on my phone”, who then noticed the airplane on my status bar and said “oh, you got the little airplane, that’s the problem”. Shit; so then I had to explain that wi-fi works in airplane mode. It was just a distraction for them. I couldn’t really convince them that the problem isn’t anything I’m doing wrong. There is no tech support for this situation -- like pretty much all captive portal scenarios. Being the customer of the customer is a very weak position to be in when the direct customer doesn’t really give a shit if it works or not.

So, has anyone seen this kind of behavior? I run into shitty broken captive portals often enough that I guess I really need to get a better understanding of them, and ways to bypass them.

TLS-encumbered captive portal (transit service)

A transit service offered wi-fi but the network forcibly redirected me to a captive portal that triggers this error:

net::ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

I tried a couple browsers and tried rewriting the https:// scheme as http:// but SSL redirect was forced consistently. The error apparently implies my phone’s browser can’t do TLS 1.3.

It seems like a shitty move for a transit service to require passengers to use TLS 1.3 just to tick a fucking box that says “I agree” (to the terms no one reads anyway). Couple questions:

• I’m generally in the /protect everything by default/ school of thought. But I cannot get my head around why a captive portal where people just tap “I agree” would warrant disclosure protection that could hinder availability. In reality, I don’t really know what the captive portal at hand requests.. maybe it demands people’s phone# or email, in which case it might make sense (though I would object to them collecting that info in a GDPR region in the 1st place).

• Is there a good reason for a captive portal to require TLS 1.3? It seems either the network provider does not trust their own network, or they’re simply incompetent (assumes everyone runs the latest phones). But if I’m missing something I would like to understand it.

I still have to investigate what limitation my browser has and whether I can update this whilst being trapped on an unrooted Android 5.

Bypass methods

I guess I need to study:

• ICMP tunnel (slow, but IIUC it’s the least commonly blocked)
• SSH tunnel
• others?

Are there any decent FOSS tools that implement the client side of tunnels without needing root? I have openvpn but have not tested to see if that can circumvent captive portals. I’ve only found:

• MultiVNC - VNC over SSH
• AVNC - VNC over SSH
• ConnectBot - Can all traffic be routed over this SSH tunnel, or just a shell session?
• VX ConnectBot - same as connectBot but expanded

I’m curious if the VNC clients would work but at the same time I’m not keen to bring in the complexity of then having to find a VNC server. Running my own server at home is not an option.

My to-do list of things to tinker with so far:

• Captive Portal Controller
• ~~CaptivePortalLogin~~ (AOS 6+, and no Izzy archives on this)
• Hotspot Login

Legal options

If a supplier advertises Wi-Fi but then they render it dysfunctional by imposing arbitrary tech requirements after consumers have already bought the product/service it was included with (coffee, train/bus/plane fare, etc), then they neglect to support it, doesn’t that constitute false advertising? Guess this is out of scope for the community but I might be ½ tempted to file false advertising claims with consumer protection agencies in some cases.

And when a captive portal demands email or phone number, it would seem to be a GDPR violation. Some public libraries make wi-fi access conditional on sharing a mobile phone number which then entails an SMS verification loop.

update (phones bought last year already obsolete)

TLS 1.3 was not introduced until Android OS 10 (sept.2019). That was the release date of AOS 10. Older devices like AOS 9 would still be sold at that time and continuing at least into 2023. Shops do not pull their stock from the shelves when the end of support arrives. This means people buying new COTS Android devices just last year or even this year are already too out of date for the TLS 1.3 captive portal to function.

It’s seriously disgusting how many people expect consumers to upgrade this chronically fast.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/10262373

Question for people willing to visit Cloudflare sites:

How do you determine whether to trust a login page on a CF site? A sloppy or naïve admin would simply take the basic steps to putting their site on Cloudflare, in which case the authentication traffic traverses CF. Diligent admins setup a separate non-CF host for authentication.

Doing a view-source on the login page and inspecting the code seems like a lot of effort. The source for the lemmy.world login page is not humanly readable. It looks as if they obfuscated the URLs to make them less readable. Is there a reasonably convenient way to check where the creds go? Do you supply bogus login info and then check the httpput headers?

Question for people willing to visit Cloudflare sites:

How do you determine whether to trust a login page on a CF site? A sloppy or naïve admin would simply take the basic steps to putting their site on Cloudflare, in which case the authentication traffic traverses CF. Diligent admins setup a separate non-CF host for authentication.

Doing a view-source on the login page and inspecting the code seems like a lot of effort. The source for the lemmy.world login page is not humanly readable. It looks as if they obfuscated the URLs to make them less readable. Is there a reasonably convenient way to check where the creds go? Do you supply bogus login info and then check the httpput headers?

An HTML-only email from a gov agency has a logo referencing an URL that looks like this:

https://1wy1y.mjt.lu/tplimg/1wy1y/f/l9hl7/g3q3v.png

It’s not exactly that (apart from the domain) but of course it’s rather unique looking. They send email routinely. The initial emails had an obviously non-suspicious basic logo, like “(their office domain)/files/logo.png”. But then later they switched and every message from them is the URL in the mjt.lu domain. It’s not unique per message but it could be unique to the user, perhaps to keep tabs on when each person reads their messages.

The output of torsocks curl -LI looks like this:

HTTP/2 200
date: (exactly now)
content-type: image/png
accept-ranges: bytes

That’s it. It’s the shortest HTTP header I’ve seen. There’s no content-length. I find that suspicious because if this is a service that facilitates tracker pixels, then they would want to withhold the length in order to dodge detection. Although from its usage in my case it wouldn’t just be a pixel -- it’s a logo.

The date is also suspect. Shouldn’t the date be the date of the object, not the current time this second?

Are there any other checks to investigate this?

The technical mechanism:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.devicelock

update

To be clear, I am not the OP who experienced this problem. I just linked them from here.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/9936059

I would like to collect the scenarios in which people are forced to enter Google’s #walledGarden (that is, to establish and/or maintain an account).

If someone needs a Google service to access something essential like healthcare or education, that’s what I want to hear about. To inspire a list of things that are “essential” I had a look at human rights law to derive this list:

• right to life
• healthcare
• freedom of expression
• freedom of assembly and of association
• right to education
• right to engage in work and access to placement services
• fair and just working conditions
• social security and social assistance
• consumer protection
• right to vote
• right to petition
• right of access to (government) documents
• right to a nationality (passport acquisition)
• right of equal access to public service in his country

Below is what I have encountered personally, which serves as an example of the kind of experiences I want to hear about:

• Google’s Playstore is a gate-keeper to most Android apps in the world and this includes relatively essential apps, such as:
  • emergency apps (e.g. that dial 112 in Europe or 911 in the US)
  • banking apps
  • apps for public services (e.g. public parking)
  • others?
• (education) Google docs is used by students in public schools, by force to some extent. Thus gdocs sometimes cannot be escaped in pursuit of education. When groups of students collaborate, sometimes the study groups impose use of gdocs. Some secondary school teachers impose the use of Google accounts for classroom projects.
• (education) A public university’s wi-fi network involved a captive portal and the only way to gain access was to supply credentials for a Google or Facebook account.

I’ve noticed that when creating an account for a public service I often have the option to supply credentials for Google or Facebook to bypass the verification process. In all cases of this kind of registration shortcut being used for public service, there was an alternative Google-free way to open the account. But in the private sector, I’ve seen this style of registration that absolutely required a proxy login via some shitty walled garden (like the university wi-fi). So I wonder if there are any situations where a government (anywhere in the world) requires a Google account in order to get service.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8864206

I bought a Silicondust HD Homerun back before they put their website on Cloudflare. I love the design of having a tuner with a cat5 port, so the tuner can work with laptops and is not dependent on being installed into a PC.

But now that Silicondust is part of Cloudflare, I will no longer buy their products. I do not patronize Cloudflare patrons.

I would love to have a satellite tuner in a separate external box that:

• tunes into free-to-air content
• has a cat5 connection
• is MythTV compatible

Any hardware suggestions other than #Silicondust?

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/9382315

I have had no problem using VOIP over #protonVPN until recently. Connections happen but there is no audio. Anyone notice this?

I wondered if maybe they decided to make VOIP a non-free feature, but their premium plans do not list VOIP as an extra feature.

“Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that ‘over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians’ were scanned into Cadillac Fairview's database”. Wow.

This Wired article is contradictory. The spokesperson says:

“an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface”

I suppose it’s possible that a sloppy developer would name an executable Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe which merely senses the presence of a face. But it seems like a baldfaced lie when you consider that:

“Invenda sales brochures that promised ‘the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders’ of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting consent.”

Boycott Mars

I already boycott Mars because they are a GMA member and they spent ~$500k lobbying against #GMO labeling -- and they have been blackballed for using child slave labor -- and Mars supports Russia. This is another good reason to #boycottMars.

Update

Apparently a LemmyBug replaced the article URL with a picture URL. The article is here:

https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/

The vending machine pic is here:

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/2041d717-7cd7-4393-94f3-96aa87817aa7.jpeg