Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

About 20 years ago, there was only dial-up internet available in my street. My parents lived about 200 m away from me in another street, and they could get ADSL. So I set up a wireless bridge to them, and it worked surprisingly well after some tweaking. Kept it running for a few years, eventually got my own connection because one day my dad called me because he needed the router password. Turns out he was also sharing the connection with his neighbour who was running an internet radio station.

Nope, I prefer being able to run my own network router, open/close my own ports, block ads on the network, hopefully get as much bandwidth as I can, etc. so it's usually better for me to subscribe to my own internet.

... But since you bring it up, coincidentally I currently live on a street with shops/restaurants on the main floor under me. And all their wifi networks are visible from my apartment... so technically yeah, if I go through the trouble of collecting all their wifi passwords I could just hang out on their networks for free internet. Internet probably wouldn't be great and not very private without a VPN but for free web browsing it should work.

I'm currently broke enough that I just rely on the public Xfinitywifi signal and a relative's Xfinity login. If I need not-weird-captive-portal-internet for something, I bridge and rebroadcast the Xfinitywifi connection using my laptop.

Not exactly pirating but thought this might be a useful anecdote to share

In my previous home I was possibly using the wifi of my neighbors sometimes. Just for fun. Since they left the default password on it. I could even login into their router once on wifi. And open ports or whatever. That I didn't do.

A long time ago lived in an apartment and used an openwrt router and some can-tenas to connect to the leasing offices guest wifi. Worked okay for about a year. Made sure to limit my torrents to after business hours. Then i was able to buy my own service so retired the setup.

Kind of I guess. Didn't have home internet so I would park my car in a home depot parking lot with a laptop torrenting off the public wifi and then walk the rest of the way to work.

About 10 years ago, I just moved and my new neighbor had an open network. Problem was they were 2 houses away and across the street. I set up a tiny repeater in my car with a battery pack and parked half way between us.

It worked surprising well for about 6 months.

When I was living in a car I'd wardrive nightly to find Wifi. This was before Wifi was commonly available in public spaces, and household routers often used a default password or no password at all. I'd use it to pirate games and movies to keep myself entertained.

Later I moved into a 4 plex apartment and convinced the neighbors to share one Internet connection. We ran ethernet through walls and across the roof and split the bill.

About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.

The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.

I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.

We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it's been a while), and because my modem wasn't registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn't last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)

There is freifunk in Germany they use Mesh Network -> Router > VPN to another Country so they dont get Problems by People pirating.

I built a Pwnagotchi but I haven't cracked any of it's handshakes yet.

There are a few towns that became their own internet providers b/c the big guys wouldn't bring them either any or adequate service and they realized they could do it themselves more cheaply. They had to fight anti-socialism propaganda and of course lobbying and disinformation campaigns from the big providers, despite the fact that they had no intention of ever going there.

Not exactly, but when I was in student dorms, the day when the contract ended if you booked for next year you paid basically nothing and got the highest tier of speeds, I assume its a bug in their system or something because its only for that 1 day and they dont advertise it as a special offer.

Back in the WEP/WPS days it was easy enough to use aircrack-ng and get access to a network. Anything public is likely to be slow and probably no access to open ports or manage it in any way.

I'm paying ~$45 CAD/month for a symmetrical 500Mbps line and I think its worth it. I'd never share this with anyone I don't know because my name is on it, anything anyone does will come back to me.

I used to crack my neighbour's WEP secured Wifi back in the day.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network... I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own "secured" network lol. I'm fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn't have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

When I was in college, I rented a house just outside my budget and found I couldn't afford things like cable internet.

I had a wifi->ethernet bridge that was originally to connect my OG Xbox to a wifi network. I also had neighbors with Wifi using WEP encryption. An idea was born.

Was able to use aircrack-ng on my laptop to crack their WEP key in about 15 minutes. Plugged that key into my wifi->ethernet bridge, and then hooked that into my router. Bam, my whole house was online.

That worked for probably a year and a half.

I'm sharing an internet connection with my neighbors for these reasons. In germany, we have "freifunk" which is just what you're explaining I think. I would definitely love to maximize this though.