Re: Broadband theft

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 22:33:37 +0000 (UTC), Dave <davenpat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote the following to uk.comp.misc:

> Marcus Houlden wrote:
>
>
>> I'm curious about what makes you think lots of data is being transferred.
>
> Our son had his lap top on top of my wife's computer case and when I
> turned round, it looked as if he was down/up loading a huge file. It
> took ages.

Might be worth checking it was just that particular file. The net works at
the speed of the slowest link. You might have a 2 Mbps connection to
yourself, but a remote system might have 256 Kbps shared between 10 - 15
users. Try downloading XP service pack 2 from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displaylang=en
(or http://tinyurl.com/5bobl) on your and your wife's machines. At about 270
MB it's a pretty big file, but on a 2 Mbps connection it should only take
about half an hour.

> I just need to know how he can plug a lap top into my broad band and
> down/op load so easily. And how to stop him doing it without my permission.

There are ways you can "poison" the router so that he can't get online when
he plugs in his laptop [1], but it might be best to have a quiet word with
him first.

[1] In technical terms, when he connects his laptop, it requests an IP
address using DHCP. Your router (which has the same internals as mine even
though it's a different brand) can allocate a IP address based on the MAC
address of the laptop. From this it's very easy to give him an IP address
which is not routable, that is one that can't get onto the net. Provided the
router password is kept secure, he won't be able to get round it without
changing his network card or using a different machine. You don't need to
know what these terms mean unless you want to do this, but anyway:

IP address - the address of the computer on the Internet
MAC address - a string of numbers that identifies the physical network card
or modem. This is unique to the card
DHCP - a way of automatically getting an IP address and a few other settings

mh.
--
>From address is a blackhole. Reply-to address is valid.

"People are animals too."
.

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