Beware WarKitteh, the connected cat that sniffs your Wi-Fi privates

Re: Wide open?

I know those modems. The guest network is fine and not actually open. A lot of hotspots appear open but use other authentication these days so WarKitteh is likely to be deceptive in stats. Generally Wi-Fi is reasonably likely to be secure when I've looked around lately, we're far from the heyday of wardriving. Usually if you want to crack a network Reaver is your only option, and most WPS schemes have protection built in against it now anyway.

An aside, those modems aren't Cisco. Most Rogers hardware is from Hitron. The current "state of the art" modem they're pushing everyone to is a Hitron CGN3.

Re: "reboot them a few times a week" - Luxury, sheer luxury

Since you're feeling lumbered, I feel I should point out you can use your own router (depending on what services you use from BT). Just put the username on a 3rd party router as bthomehub@btbroadband.com, leave the password blank.

I'm lumbered with a BT Internet connection, but I refuse to be lumbered with their "I'll resell the pipes you're paying for to BTFon users" router.

Re: "reboot them a few times a week" - Luxury, sheer luxury

Not the first time BT's firmware wizards have buggered up firmware, there was a longstanding issue on one of the two revisions of the Home Hub 2 where an upload of more than a specific not-very-large-amount-of-data (of the order of a few MB, IIRC) would cause the damn thing to reboot. I ended up with 3 of the things, because they screwed up the first replacement and gave me a second buggered unit. (Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Home_Hub, if you're interested).

If it's happening regularly, get onto their support folks. They probably won't want to, but stick to the "your product is stopping me using the service I pay for" line and they should eventually give in...

Re: Next step...

I don't know why he didn't use the cat's built-in radio equipment.

Re: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo

For some kitties, you can mix water and vinegar in a bottle and squirt it on them. Be sure to squirt a place they can lick, otherwise you'll be smelling vinegar for a while. Once you squirt the cat, he will spend a few moments cleaning the vinegar off his fur. For some cats, a few squirts of this and they will learn.

But some cats don't respond to this. What worked for me was one of those devices that emit a high-pitched noise that hurts a dog's ears. Well, it hurts a cat's ears too. If the cat isn't deaf (older cats tend to go deaf) then a couple of quick zaps with these devices will do the trick. If this isn't your cat, you will want to try this first, because your neighbor might smell vinegar squirted on a cat.

Re: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo

Just bill the owner for repairs. Their animal, their responsibility.

If they refuse to pay up they can look forward to paying for repairs plus your fees in the small claims court.

Re: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo

If 'she' is spraying your bike 'she' is almost certainly He, most females don't spray.

Just to eliminate one potential cure to stop cats spraying your bike or anything else; A friend of mine in the UK wanted to stop a local tomcat from digging up his bedding plants and replacing them with lovingly crafted cat turds, while shopping to replace lost plants in the local garden centre he discovered pellets that were derived from or contained tiger shit. The idea obviously being that a tiger is somewhat further up the ladder of catkind than a local moggy, the said moggy however had clearly not been watching the Nature Channel and had no idea what had produced the new smell on HIS gardens so he sprayed and replaced bedding plants even more.

Or maybe he had been watching and knew there were no tigers in South East London.

I've always be tempted..

... to spray noisy bikers especially when they stop outside my house and leave beer bottles and cans all around...

Re: re: Beware WarKitteh, the connected cat that sniffs your Wi-Fi privates

This is a country slightly to the west of continental Yurop. Of course there is.

Re: Stats?

"I think that the wildly different content sought by searches for "Cat" and "Pussy" may be skewing the stats."

That may be true, but search engine analytics would be able to differentiate between searches for "pussy" by detecting whether the search is run with the family-friendly filter on or off...

Re: Madness

Well, I set up my wifi with a guest account on open wifi a bunch of times when I had a party on, or when neighbours moved in/out and needed temporary access, just to have the average Joe/Jane not nagging me for passwords. I know. Lazy. I frankly don't care in those situations they are open to packet capturing, as I'm not their brother's keeper. Just don't do your banking on it if you are paranoid.

My own WPA2 secured wifi also is set up for MAC filtering. So only "authorised" users can get on it. Unless of course a real savvy user comes along and breaks through the defenses, but then what chance would I have anyways? The MAC filtering was a remnant from when I had to use open wifi as some peripherals didn't play well with wep/wap (stupid printer, and a security camera (really!!) ).

And cats are vermin, not cute and not funny, and think they are the boss. Like real bosses really.