Doctor Who-style WiFi

wifi

Spoilers, sweetie…

If you didn’t catch the latest episode of Doctor Who, here’s the plot: Random people connect to strangely-named WiFi networks and later have their conciousness uploaded to the Internet with the help of spoonheaded robots. To the non-Whovian that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but [Tony Box] figured out a way to replicate the effect with a Linux box and a USB WiFi card, just in time for a great April Fool’s gag.

For the SSID, the folks over on reddit decided the best characters come from the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Unicode block. [Tony] then set up a laptop with a USB wifi card with hostapd, and dnsmasq to change the SSID and DHCP leases. nginx serves up a simple web page with a short clip from the episode (of a spoonhead uploading a conciousness).

Here’s what’s really interesting: [Tony] is using a captive portal, so something like the webpage that shows up when you log on to the internet in a coffee shop or hotel. When the victim of this prank logs on to The Great Intelligence’s WiFi, they’re presented with a webpage containing the video of the spoonhead.

You can check out [Tony]’s demo of his build after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlQD9sxTsAw&w=580]

20 thoughts on “Doctor Who-style WiFi

    1. fixed (int* ptrMemory = targetMemAddr) {
      fixed (int* ptrHuman = Environment.HumanInterfaceDevice) {
      for (int i = 0; i < Environment.HumanInterfaceDevice.Length / sizeof(int); i++) {
      *ptrMemory = *ptrHuman;
      }
      }

  1. I love how they were all ‘hacking’ I was laughing thinking about the other thread on worst hacking ever. Kinda reminded me of puppets typing on keyboards…

    Although, I would like the Dr.’s mobile phone… maybe Google will add that feature to the next Nexus :)

  2. I wonder… At least in the US, SSIDs using visibly-unicode(obviously ascii, latin1, etc. have been incorporated as subsets for convenience) characters are pretty rare. I wonder how many devices and OSes and horrid vendor wifi utilities there are out there that puke in amusing and/or vulnerable ways if you try some of the more eccentric unicode bits on them?

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