Over 25 years ago, during the dial-up era, there were many computers compromised with certain worms that would open up your computer for remote connections. One of the possibilities when connected was to download the system saved passwords including those for the dial up software. I had many, many, such logins saved including corporate and education ones, with no time caps. During about a year I would only pay for the phone call, not for the internet service. Simpler times.

Once in WEP days, before smartphones. I was on vacation on this place without internet and I cracked someone’s wifi password to get internet. It was wild how easy was to crack Wi-Fi’s passwords.

my friend had a black box for cable back in the day but that was about it; i would say internet would probably have been easier for the dial up networks in the 90s since most of the time they were wide open as long as you knew the number.

in dial-up times i tried to steal internet cafe’s account. my purpose was using cafe account at night after cafe closed. there was a program which one is showing password with ******. i put it in floppy disk then went to internet cafe. I put the floopy disk in place and heard different sound.i looked at and my disk fell into pc case. so there was not floppy disk drive on pc. after that day i sent my friend to bring back my floppy disk. cafe owner said “that hacker never come back here again”

A friend of mine used to live right above a McDonalds and used their free Wi-Fi all the time.

Exactly the opposite in fact. I aspire to host the exit node! I’d love for my whole neighborhood to mesh our networks together and form an Intranet of self hosted services. It’s a massive uphill battle in suburbia, but I have high hopes for similar projects in my local city proper.

Yeah. Twenty years ago. I worked for two ISPs over the years. At both of them the test accounts for support to use were unmonitored accounts due to how many places they were used and logged in by. In both cases I simply put those login details into my home setup and got free internet for probably about three years. Before that some friends got a un/pw file from a university and decrypted a few hundred names and passwords for accounts which gave free dialup access to students. Again multiple logins seemed allowed so the only person losing was the uni/isp. Used to be able to pull about ~14gb a month through a dialup connection. Probably via napster, kazaa and soulseek, I can’t remember if torrents were a thing back then.

Back in my teenage ps3 days, my then neighbour’s didn’t set a password and the WiFi was completely open.

Not recently, but I had bought a USB GPS unit for my laptop back in the mid 2000’s specifically for war-driving, mapping, and cracking the weak-ass encryption of early Wifi routers to share with a community of travelers when free wifi hotspots weren’t really a thing.

I’ve been stealing your wifi this hole time.

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.

In the U.S. during the 90’s, there were free ISP dial-up trial CD’s everywhere, especially in retail checkout lanes. You were free to take as many as you wanted which was great because each CD had a unique code for the trial period offered.

After installing the providers software and creating a free email address, you’d signup for a new account and get anywhere from 30 minutes to “thousands of hours” of dial-up internet access per CD, for free (not counting paying for a landline phone service). If you ran out, delete the account and start with a new one under a new code.

Nothing was required outside of generic info (name, address etc) which could be made up because there were no real verification checks.

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.

So, this was more common when WEP encryption was used. You could just listen to the radio traffic of the given network and collect IVs which the encryption would leak. Once you had enough pieces you could reassemble the key and access the network. When WPA came out it was harder, but tools like pyrit and john the ripper helped, so long as you were able to capture the 4-way TCP handshake.

To actually see the networks, you would build biquad parabolic antennas from old DirecTV dishes people left behind. They were very directional high gain antennas that you would just target at someone’s house. We’d also build cantennas from junk laying around. Those were interesting days.

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.