Hi all,
OK, the title of this post has whetted your appetite for sordid details, but this is actually somewhat serious.
Recently I was in a public library and the Wifi router near me was defective. It wasn't working at all. At a certain point, a young employee of the library walked near where I was and started doing what I thought was stacking books. The odd thing was, she kept popping her head out to look at myself and some others patrons, as if to see what we were doing. Nothing to worry about really.
But I had noticed that just when she arrived, a new Wifi network had appeared, called something like Free Public Internet. I didn't connect to it because I assume it was a computer-to-computer connection and I don't use those.
I then got up to stretch and walked around and I noticed that this low-level worker was not in fact stacking books, she was just crouched there behind a nearby shelf seemingly doing nothing but looking at her iPhone.
At this point I realized, most likely her iPhone was the new network and for whatever reason she was eager to have us patrons using her iPhone as a router to access the Internet. But why? Because it would be analyzing and storing our packets.
I recall hearing maybe 10 years ago that there was a Mac application -- I forget the name, because I didn't use Macs at the time -- that could intercept packets from unencrypted Wifi connections and piece together any files that were being transferred using http. It was commonly used, people said, for piecing together image files and displaying those.
My question is, what app is being used for this nefarious activity? I assume it requires a jailbroken iPhone.
And why doesn't Apple prevent use of the iPhone as a router?
OK, the title of this post has whetted your appetite for sordid details, but this is actually somewhat serious.
Recently I was in a public library and the Wifi router near me was defective. It wasn't working at all. At a certain point, a young employee of the library walked near where I was and started doing what I thought was stacking books. The odd thing was, she kept popping her head out to look at myself and some others patrons, as if to see what we were doing. Nothing to worry about really.
But I had noticed that just when she arrived, a new Wifi network had appeared, called something like Free Public Internet. I didn't connect to it because I assume it was a computer-to-computer connection and I don't use those.
I then got up to stretch and walked around and I noticed that this low-level worker was not in fact stacking books, she was just crouched there behind a nearby shelf seemingly doing nothing but looking at her iPhone.
At this point I realized, most likely her iPhone was the new network and for whatever reason she was eager to have us patrons using her iPhone as a router to access the Internet. But why? Because it would be analyzing and storing our packets.
I recall hearing maybe 10 years ago that there was a Mac application -- I forget the name, because I didn't use Macs at the time -- that could intercept packets from unencrypted Wifi connections and piece together any files that were being transferred using http. It was commonly used, people said, for piecing together image files and displaying those.
My question is, what app is being used for this nefarious activity? I assume it requires a jailbroken iPhone.
And why doesn't Apple prevent use of the iPhone as a router?
