Waves with Wireless Nerd
Join me for a weekly look into what's making waves in tech and the wireless industry! What's new? What's now? What's next?
Waves with Wireless Nerd
Tech Innovations Over Coffee: The Death of the Captive Portal - Unpacking iOS 18's Privacy Twist, Vodafone's 5G Marvel, and Wireless Future Insights
Curious about the latest innovation in tech and how it could impact your privacy and connectivity? Join us for a morning chat over coffee as we unpack Apple's iOS 18 and its unique MAC address rotation feature. Based on a recent discussion with an old friend, we'll explore the privacy benefits and potential network connectivity challenges posed by this new feature, and how it might influence the broader industry. Plus, engage with us on social media for your chance to weigh in on these intriguing updates. We'll also share some personal plans for the July 4th holiday and spotlight an insightful article from Cloud4Wi that addresses the technical nuances and industry concerns of Apple's latest privacy measures.
Celebrate the end of the Captive Portal era with us as we remember its significant contributions and the patents held by Nomadix. We'll discuss a recent cybercrime case involving an evil twin Wi-Fi attack on flights, underlining the severe legal consequences. Discover Vodafone's groundbreaking private 5G network solution with the LimeNet Micro 2.0 developer edition, a Raspberry Pi-powered 5G base station kit that's turning heads. Stay tuned for the latest industry updates, from 5G Advanced to Starlink's hurdles in Indonesia, and Siemens' smart city initiatives in Berlin. We'll also share our excitement about testing wireless tools like the Sidos unit and the Epiq Prism, promising in-depth reviews soon.
Good morning, good afternoon, what's up everybody? You know it's. I figured I would jump on this morning and just chat. I'm having a coffee and I had a great conversation with an old friend here for about I don't know. It was supposed to be one of those conversations that only lasted like five or six minutes, ended up lasting 30 minutes, but that's okay. It was a good conversation to have.
Speaker 1:Uh, this person, who shall remain nameless, um, we had a great chat about what's going on with captive portals and what's going on with ios 18 and the mac address rotation thing that's happening that Apple introduced, and what the effects of everything is going to be, or what are the effects on everything going to be, and it was a great conversation. So I figured I would, instead of sitting here and going through my notes and figuring out what I was going to say for the next 15 minutes, I figured I would just jump on and open it up and have a good time. So maybe a little bit different format this morning. I'm going to drink a cup of coffee and go through some of the stuff, but I'd really love to make this more conversational and I always do a terrible job of keeping up with comments, especially during the live broadcast. I get back to the comments, I answer people's questions afterwards and lots of DMs and stuff, which is really cool. But if there's anything that you want to ask or you want to chat about, jump on. You know I get a lot of people to get on Twitter to watch, or X X Twitter, whatever it's called. There's a handful of viewers on there right now, so I'd love to see some engagement. If you have questions, ask away and I'll be happy to chit-chat with anyone watching, but right now I want to talk about captive portals. Let's chat, send in some questions, he says, on the platform formerly known as Twitter. So I've got that open right now. Let's see if anybody responds there. Anyway, good morning. I hope everybody is having a great week.
Speaker 1:We're two days before July 4th. Here in the United States of America, I'm getting ready to go down to the beach and go spend some quality family time sitting in the sun, drinking some beverages and listening to some music and catching up with family. That's what I'm going to do for the next two days. It's going to be pretty cool. So, yeah, let's talk about captive portals. This will be interesting.
Speaker 1:I know there's a lot of people who have just give me a second. Here I'm opening up a couple tabs and staring blankly off into space. I really need to take the advice of one, mr Keith Parsons, and I need to get a teleprompter, because I was cutting clips from the last show. It looks like I'm AI. It looks like I'm just like talking in one direction and looking in another. So I apologize for that, but you know what, man, if someone wants to send me a teleprompter, I'll be happy to use it. Until then, the one that I like is a little bit too expensive for my own needs right now. Let me see if I can open up this post so that if anybody comments on LinkedIn, I can have that live and direct. Okay, I got Twitter going, I got LinkedIn going. If someone sends in a question or whatnot, I'll be happy to chit chat. So let's talk about captive portals.
Speaker 1:So Apple introduces this thing on iOS 18 that essentially allows your Mac address to be rotated so that no one really ever knows who you are, what your device is. Mac address rotation let's find some source of information, because I do have a question about it and I wonder if anybody out there in listener land knows I don't know if. How often does it rotate? Because I know at one point they talked about every time you initiate a connection it rotates. Or every time you send a packet it rotates, or is it once a day? Is it once a week? The new feature let's see it takes a step further by periodically changing the device's Mac address, even after it has connected to the network. So Cloud4Y has an article that they published, it looks like, and they ask about this. And let's see. They say building on the foundation of Mac address randomization, apple has now introduced Mac address rotation in ios 18, ipad os 18 and mac os sequoia. New feature takes privacy a step further by periodically changing the device's mac address, even after it is connected to a network.
Speaker 1:Okay, unlike mac randomization, which changes the mac address during the probing phase, mac address rotation ensures that the mac address changes at regular intervals. I wonder what those intervals are. Even when connected to an existing network, that means the device's identifier remains dynamic. Ensures that the MAC address changes at regular intervals. I wonder what those intervals are. Even when connected to an existing network, that means the device's identifier remains dynamic, further complicating any attempts to track. So this is good.
Speaker 1:I'm glad Cloud4Y is approaching this because this was the concern at the WBA Wireless Global Congress. Everybody was talking about this and the guy from Cloud4Y was standing up on stage and everyone's like yo, what's going to happen? It I was talking about this and the guy from Cloud4Y was standing up on stage and everyone's like yo, what's going to happen? It says iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 are currently available to developers. So the article here is almost exactly what I want to talk about Ensuring seamless Wi-Fi with PPSK and Passpoint. Not so interested in PPSK, more interested in Passpoint, because I look at this and I think about what this means overall to the entire industry at large and how this is going to change the way that we get on networks and how it changes the way that we're going to use networks.
Speaker 1:So if you have any questions, please drop them in my chat on LinkedIn. Hit us up on us, meaning me the mouse in my pocket. Drop a message on Twitter. I've got both those options open right now and I don't know if anyone's watching on YouTube or not. I guess I could take a look and see what's happening on YouTube right now. I've got one person watching on YouTube. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1:So, as far as I know it changes Mac address every two weeks. That's what Anders Nielsen says. Oh, anders, is it two weeks? Is that periodically? I don't know. Either way, I've always thought about this thing, since it was introduced, as something that was a negative. But in a conversation I was having with a buddy of mine today, I started to see the positive in it. And okay, and positive is subjective, right, I think once you take the captive portal out of the way basically what that means.
Speaker 1:And let's pick on hotels. For example, I go to a hotel, I log into the captive portal and it's able to identify me and my name and my room number, associated with the MAC address on my device. It can see you know Drew, as a guest, is in this room and going to. You know going to the restaurant this many times, or going to the bar, or you know spending this much time in his room, or this is what time he showed up on the property and this is what time he left. There's a lot of information that can be gleaned on that.
Speaker 1:But now with the and I'm not saying that all hospitality groups do that Some of them don't even associate the last name and the room number with the MAC address, but nevertheless, it takes a MAC address and it says this MAC address traveled around this property and this is where it went and where it spent a lot of time. And then you can even dissect that further. Right, you can say, okay, well, you know when this MAC address was in the restaurant, this is how often they were using social media. Or when they went outside by the pool, this is how much time they spent on social media. Were they posting? Hopefully they were posting and hashtagging, whatever the name of the property is or whatnot.
Speaker 1:But there's all these different ways that identifying location associated with device can get information that's important to the property, but now there's no way to do that. That's important to the property, but now there's no way to do that. Right Now, with iOS 18, I mean now as in the future there's not going to be a way to do that, because you won't be able to associate a single MAC address with where it is on the property. And so now you lose out in the ability to understand where people go and where they spend their time, which there's two sides to that argument. One is good protect my privacy. The other is bad Now facilities doesn't know where to put the emphasis. If they don't know how many people are going to specific areas and spending time there, maybe they don't clean the area as much as possible, maybe they don't replenish the toilet paper, maybe they don't pay attention to the little details of that area which arguably, they could be doing better overall. But nevertheless, once you have that data and you start to rely on that data, you change the way that your business operates.
Speaker 1:Right, and I've been on the other side of that, preaching the idea that you can use this data to do these incredible things with for so long. Well, now that's gone, whoopsie, didn't see Apple doing that one, but I think that it's actually ushering a better time and I think, for the providers tricky. Tricky because I think what I'm imagining is going to happen is I'm trying to identify ways that people could still get information about guests and about people that are on the property, but in a way that's going to still allow them to use that information, but without the captive portal. And the only thing that comes to mind right now is Passpoint. And I say that and this is without reading the Cloud for why? Article, because I'm pretty sure it's probably going to say about the same thing, maybe not, I could be wrong. We'll read it here in a little bit and find out, no-transcript that credential on your phone and then you can get connected to the network and you're good to go in a safe, secure, seamless fashion. And now every time you visit one of those properties it's just automatically going to associate to that network, to that Passpoint network at those properties.
Speaker 1:Now this is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a very good thing for the properties because I think it's being forced into the concept of well, now we're going to be able to identify not just Drew, but Drew Marriott Bonvoy, number 1234 has logged into the Wi-Fi and is in all these different locations, because we've got the direct tie-in to the application as well as the tie-in to the Wi-Fi that's going to be able to correlate that information together. So now I can imagine the incredible things that happen with that. Not just does it authenticate myself when I walk onto the Marriott property or the Hilton property or the Hyatt or whatever it is, I walk in and I'm automatically on. No more logging in, but I'm doing it in a safe and secure way. I walk in and I'm automatically on no more logging in, but I'm doing it in a safe and secure way, fully encrypted, versus today where it's not encrypted.
Speaker 1:There's a good cause for that, especially there's lots of stuff happening in that world right now. So not only am I safely and securely and seamlessly connected, but then I can imagine well, dude, if it knows that Drew Marriott Bonvoy, number 1234, is staying in room, you know 805. Well, why not have it store my credentials for Netflix and why not have it store my credentials for Hulu or whatever it is? And when I walk into the property, now I can immediately connect to my entire life because it's absolutely connected to my identity, whereas before it was like well, your MAC address could be, it could be your kid, or it could be, you know, your wife, or it could be whatever it is, and maybe it doesn't authenticate. The same way, now you have a way to tie it directly to a device and to tie that member device, using the app, into that Passpoint credential.
Speaker 1:So now I think there's a bigger opportunity, a larger opportunity for properties to take advantage of that by understanding exactly who people are, which is a benefit to the properties from what we're doing with Captive Portal. Now, from a privacy perspective, maybe that's not all that great, you know, and I think that there's definitely going to be a need to opt out of sharing those credentials. But I can already see the spot. I can already see the page in the app that says click here to get on the Wi-Fi, but also click here to opt out of any marketing or tracking or whatever else it is. So I think that that's going to have to be something that's bright, bold and in your face to make people feel that security when they walk in a property. But either way, I think that this Mac randomization thing is going to be cool because it's going to usher in a whole new level of functionality that we hadn't seen before, and when you take into account what's happening with 6E and what's happening with 7 and OWE and WPA3 and all the encryption mechanisms that have to take place in order to get people in the network do, passpoint is starting to make a whole hell of a lot of sense for these properties.
Speaker 1:So that was the gist of my conversation this morning and I think it really. If you look at the bigger picture of how that's going to affect all of these different places, not just hospitality, but how it's going to affect retail and everything. Then you can really start to see how okay well, maybe this does end up making more sense. So thank you, apple. I guess I don't know, the jury's still out Is this going to be a good thing for the industry or not. But if I think about big box retail and I think about quick service restaurants, and I think about fast food, and I think about all of them adopting a Passpoint service, because they're going to have to if they want to be able to identify users, without having that captive portal in place, I think that it makes a lot of sense where you can download the Taco Bell app and now you're seamlessly connected to every Taco Bell, but you're also giving up that information if you choose to opt in to allow that information to be published.
Speaker 1:So a captive Portal is dead. Long live Captive Portal. I think we should throw a little party to celebrate the life of Captive Portal. I don't know, it was fun. You know there's a lot of stuff that you could get there, but in the not-so-distant future, there it goes, and it makes me think about Nomadics, one of the things at Nomadatics they hold the patents for a lot of this stuff and you would go downstairs into their office in Calabasas and they had this wall that just went on forever. That was covered in all of their patents that they had for captive portal services and what they were able to do, and that was interesting to see. But I think that that time is now coming to an end for captive portal service, so it'll be interesting to see what happens next.
Speaker 1:So, that being said, I appreciate y'all letting me rant and if you're still listening, cool, let's see any comments. No comments on the Twitters. No comments on LinkedIn. That's okay, I'm okay with that. I don't know, let's see. Oh, we got a couple people viewing Hello, all you viewers, a lot of people on X and Twitter, which is pretty cool. Lots of people that listen on there. So if I'm in your ears, howdy, now let's move on to some of the stuff that's happening this week. What's new, what's now, what's next? One of the things that popped up on my news feed. So if there's some big ticket items I missed, I apologize If I think back on the week, you know high tech was last week. I didn't see any monster announcements coming out of high tech, but I haven't had the chance to dig through it all with a fine tooth comb. Yet here's some other stuff that popped up.
Speaker 1:Australian charged for evil twin Wi-Fi attack on a plane. This was pretty weird to read. An Australian man was charged by Australia's federal police for conducting an evil twin Wi-Fi attack on various domestic flights and airports in Perth, melbourne and Adelaide to steal other people's information as far as email and social media credentials. So he would apparently get on the plane and create an SSID identical to what the plane was and people would be forced to log in for in-flight Wi-Fi Not forced, they would log in and he'd ask for their information. And people would be forced to log in for in-flight Wi-Fi Not forced, they would log in and he'd ask for their information. He would grab all of it. So they explain what a man-in-the-mill attack is or what an evil twin attack is.
Speaker 1:But what was crazy is if you look at the charges unauthorized impairment of electronic communication, incurring a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Possession of control of data with intent to commit a serious offense, incurring a maximum penalty of three years. Unauthorized access or modification of restricted data, incurring a maximum penalty of two years in prison. These are in years in prison. Dishonestly obtaining and dealing in personal financial information five years in prison. Possession of identification information with intent to commit an offense. Those are a lot of heavy charges for someone who's doing this. So, wow, I mean, fire up a pineapple on a plane in Australia, watch out.
Speaker 1:And you know people go on to say this kind of attack is totally possible. We do it in labs, bruh Bruh, as my 7-year-old would say. It's not that difficult man. It says it's not a common attack. Okay, I mean, this is how you know you're too much in the wireless industry when man-in-the-mill and evil twin attacks are like a little easy. But dude, come on, man, go to Hack 5. Dude, come on, man, just go to Hack 5. They've got all the tools there to do all this stuff. That's not an endorsement of breaking into people's stuff. That is an endorsement of Hack 5, though I love Hack 5. Go buy some shit, man. Tell them I said hi, maybe they'll send me something That'd be cool.
Speaker 1:What else we got going on in the news today? Where's my little thing here? All right, going on in the news today? Where's my little thing here? All right, forget about wi-fi. Oh man, so check this out.
Speaker 1:This was an interesting one. Forget about wi-fi. Your own private 5g network could be the answer to your connection woes. So votaphone at mobile world congress last year started talking about this kit that they were making to push uh, private 5g networks, mpns, mobile private networks, uh based on 5g. Let's see, they unveiled their raspberry pi powered prototype of a 5g network in a box at mobile world congress 2023 in barcelona and now this year they have an improved version. So this is the lime net micro. Lime net micro 2.0 developer editiona crowdfunded series of private 5g base station kits. If you get on crowd supply, see if the link is on here crowdsupplycom slash, lime dash micro. If you, if you punch that in, let me see if that brings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you put.
Speaker 1:If you look at that and you look at the limenet micro 2.0 developer edition, this is a hat for a. It's not even a hat. It's a board that the Raspberry Pi goes onto and it allows you. It's a modular radio platform that leverages Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and LIME SDR that allows you to crank up your own 5G base station. Pretty sweet, a deluxe version comes fully loaded with Amerisoft's 5G stack and core two smartphones, 10 SIM cards, making it a turnkey private 5g network solution in a box, dude, and you can get all this online. If you go to crowdsupplycom, you can see their their little crowdsource deal and view purchasing options. It goes from 7.99 all the way up to 12,000 dollars, but for 7.99 you can get the little board and you can get a built-out kit for $11.99, and you can get all the pieces and put it together yourself.
Speaker 1:How cool is that man? The only thing that it didn't talk about is you can put this together. But does that? You know it would be even cooler if this tied into the carrier. So Vodafone was showing it off, but I don't know that it ties into Vodafone's network. To me, that would be pretty awesome. Right, where you buy the kit and it already is working with you know whoever the carrier is, so you don't have to worry about that contract. I don't know. I think that that's the biggest thing, right? Anybody I should. I could go buy a Bicels base. I've got a Bicels 430 sitting outside running helium Well, not helium anymore, but you know that's you can get this equipment for on the cheap. But tying it back into an orchestration or cloud service and then tying it back into the carrier is the real key here. That's, that's the important part, but it doesn't say. It doesn't say that it's tied into Vodafone, but that would be really neat. Imagine you can buy it in a box and you plug it in and it just works. It's like building your own little microcell. So pretty neat seeing that thing pop up.
Speaker 1:What else we got here? Oh, this was interesting. Google's AI search uses 10 times more energy than just doing a normal Google search. You're consuming approximately 3 watt hours of electricity, according to Alex DeVries, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company exploring the unintended consequences of digital trends 10 times the power consumption of a traditional Google search, roughly equivalent to the amount of power used when talking for an hour on a home phone. This guy says home phone what? Okay, I don't even know where to go with that. I have the home phone draws power over the line, it's. I'm not sure what he means by that. Anyway, boingboingnet has the article talking about this. Um, it seems like every computer in the world right now is trying to push ai, but at what cost? Dun, dun, dun. Now, this one is interesting.
Speaker 1:Uh, critical vulnerability found in open ssh. So that's uh, that's the point that I got to on updating my news stories, and then I got on the phone call and started talking about captive portals. So computinguk has got an article critical vulnerability and open ssh covered in almost all linux systems. 14 million internet facing servers are vulnerable, says qualis. They see the uh. They've named the vulnerability, the vulnerability regression ha ha, r-e-g-r-e-s-s-h-i-o-n. It represents the re-emergence of a bug that was previously patched in 2006 cve 2006 5051, if anyone remembers that, I don't know.
Speaker 1:The new vulnerability is uh cve 2024 6387 on unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges posing a severe threat to affected systems. An attacker could potentially gain complete control of the affected system Executing arbitrary code with root privileges. Update your internets y'all. Make sure, if you're running Linux, that you update SSH in there, because that could be pretty bad. That could be bad news baseball. All right, that's all the stuff that I had written down today.
Speaker 1:Let's peruse the news. Cineverse roaming outage was triggered by signaling storm Whoa. What's by signaling storm Whoa? What's a signaling storm? Some customers of AT&T, t-mobile and Verizon were unable to make calls, text and use data while traveling abroad last week. All three carriers said they're working with a third party to resolve the issues. Cineverse said the root cause stemmed from misconfiguration errors at a peering partner outside of its network. Oh dude, someone got canned C outside of its network. Oh dude, someone got canned cineverse. Okay, so cineverse provides the roaming services for all three of these carriers, so became aware of intermittent service disruption on the morning of june 26 for north american phone users traveling abroad, and, um, the carriers pointed to an unnamed third party, cineverse as a culprit, and they turned around and said well, there was a misconfiguration error at a peering partner outside of our network, which narrows it down to absolutely no one. It was not the result of a cyber attack, though. I did not experience an outage last week that I know of, so that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:What else is going on? 5g Advanced is ready for the spotlight, according to Fierce Wireless. Very good. Starlink faces rough weather in Indonesia. Hey.
Speaker 1:So if anybody knows anybody at Starlink, I'm going on a trip to Olympic National Park in a couple of weeks and I want to take a Starlink Mini with me, but I don't have one and I haven't ordered one. So if anyone's got a hookup at Starlink, let me know. I would love to see how well it works out there, especially since I'm going out to the outskirts of the park and apparently there's no cell coverage out there. I want to use my Signal Roam product with Starlink and see how well that works, but I got to get one of the little dishes first. If I don't get a little one, I'll just take a full-size Starlink, but I would love a Starlink Mini. If anybody knows anybody, or if you want to, let me borrow one that's on roaming, please. Or if you want, let me borrow one that's on roaming, please let me know. I just want to see how well it works in the absolute middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1:What else we got? Let's all on Fierce Wireless RCR, one of my favorite wireless news sources. I was talking about Maveneer using AI to support CSPs. We talked about that one already Pretty good. What else we got going on here?
Speaker 1:Siemens hails global smart city blueprint as a Berlin project kicks off Two factors hindering telco AI adoption Power, I bet, is one of those. I think that's it. Nokia prepares for AI boom with Infinera acquisition. Dean Bublé published a thought about this on LinkedIn. Yeah, this is interesting. Nokia said the purchase of Infinera, infinera, infinera, i-n-f-i-n-e-r-a, infinera, infinera, I don't know and the sale of Alcatel Submarine submarine networks business will reshape its network infrastructure unit. Yeah, I don't know enough about Infinera and I didn't have a time to research it to find out really what that means. Open optical networking solutions built on industry-leading vertically integrated optical CINME conductors Increase fiber capacity by 25%. Okay Well, I would refer you to Dean Bubbly for this one and see if that makes any sense to you.
Speaker 1:But you know what? I think that's it, instead of just wandering through the news. I didn't see anything big, anything else happening big this week. If I missed something, let me know. Otherwise, I think that's it. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go down to the beach and go relax for a couple of days. If anything pops up, I'll jump on, but I don't see any big mergers or acquisitions or anything happening in the next couple of days. I haven't heard anything. I'm hearing little tidbits about some equipment not working the way that it's supposed to. It's funny that some stuff that is supposed to be coming down the pipe for some new groups, so hopefully I'll have that soon.
Speaker 1:Oh, in other news, check this out If you're watching on the video. Oh snap, I am going to take this guy when are the other ones? And I'm going to use this and a couple of other devices and I'm going to see what kind of results I get when I go head-to-head-to-head-to-head on that. So I appreciate you know Mika, sending me this. I'm very excited to try it. I've only seen it at WLPC, but now I finally have my hands on a C-DOS unit and I'm very, very excited.
Speaker 1:My first question is where am I going to put it? Am I going to wear it on my chest? Am I going to put it? Am I going to wear it on my chest? Am I going to hold out in front of me? Am I going to hang it down on my side? Am I going to build you know it sounds goofy, but am I going to build a mount for a helmet? Am I going to build a mount like they use for videography, for cinematography, that extends it out a foot from your chest? All these and more in the upcoming weeks.
Speaker 1:On Waves We've got the Epic the Epic right behind me, the Epic Prism we're going to be testing that out. I've got a very cool project we're about to get involved in. That's going to give me some really cool scenery to test out propagation modeling and assessment tools, and I've got my hands on just about all of them. So I'm excited to do that. So that'll be coming up. So look for those reviews coming up pretty soon, not just the CETOS, I mean. I mean psychic too. I don't feel like I have to do a review, for everybody pretty much knows that one. But I haven't used cdos. I got my hands on the epic. It's very cool.
Speaker 1:Some, some pros and cons, I'm not gonna lie some pros and cons. There got the cyberscope. If there's any other tools you think I should be looking at, let me know. If you make any of these tools also, let me know. Or just send me a dm and send one and I'll throw it into the running. But for now I'm going to go play with some toys. I'm going to get down to the beach and have some fun. I hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you, as always, for listening. Appreciate you very much. Have a great day.
People on this episode
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
Clear To Send
Rowell Dionicio and François Vergès
Heavy Wireless
Packet Pushers
RUCKCast
RUCKUS Networks