Inadvertently Returning Succesful

While I was in Chicago I had the idea of trying to MAC spoof my iSpot so that I could use the wifi for non-idevices. I should point out right now that I didn’t tamper with the iSpot in any way that could have led to its sudden malfunctioning. iSpots have MAC address filters that allow only idevices to connect to the router…otherwise, at $25/month, Clear would put all other ISPs out of business; I think they prefer deft competition.

In my research of how to MAC spoof, I learned that in the early days of the iSpot, this was possible and that some individuals were reaping the rewards of a little command line knowledge. My superficial understanding of this activity is as follows: a computer’s internal MAC address is a unique identifier that is assigned but can also be spoofed to appear as an identifier of something else, such as an idevice. There’s a lot of information on MAC spoofing out there, so I won’t go over it here.

Well, today I was at the public library and had a need to change my IP address but ran into the problem that it was static, given the public wifi. So, not even thinking about the MAC address filter, I turned on the iSpot and logged in via my MacBook Pro. I refreshed ipnow.org, which showed a new IP address and went about my business. It wasn’t until I was trying to refresh the IP address a third time that I realized I had connected via the iSpot. What happened? I double-checked my wifi signal: still on the iSpot. The only other wifi signal was the public libraries, and according to both airport and ipnow.org I was not connected to it. What happened?

I’m not completely sure what happened but it may have had to do with manually MAC spoofing via Terminal prior to switching from the library to the iSpot wifi. Also, I had disassociated from any wifi signal

sudo ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport /usr/sbin/airport

Later, I get home and am still wondering what happened. I try the ipnow.org and the iSpot and am again able to connect, showing the updated IP (same as earlier today but not my home wifi’s IP).

All I can image is that somehow this device hasn’t had the firmware update that my previous device had. When I received the first device that ultimately went kerplunk, I had to connect it via USB and update the firmware before it would allow me to connect to the device. This newer unit never went through that process because the wiPhone connected immediately. But even that doesn’t fully explain why. I never fully reconfigured my MAC address; once it was changed at the library, I changed it back because it didn’t have any bearing on my IP address.

Strange.