Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: HeatFireFlame on August 12, 2013, 04:24 pm
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So I always connect to my vendor account, In a different name, Via public wifi. Now over the last 3 days I have been having some issues. I shall name them and if anyone could provide any insight it would be appreciated.
(I shall number things so it is easy to reference them.)
1. I connected to the account from a bar. Asked for the wifi pass and got in.No problems.
2. a day or so later I tried to connect from a different bar, However I booted up tails and when i connected to the wifi (without password) it said connected, Arranging tors system clock as usual, However the onion did not appear, Also iceweasel did not start automatically. Then whenever I tried to connect to the internet it would just not work.
3. Tried it from my home address. (not into the vendor account, Just to the SR main page.) no issues, (Have a password on my wifi)
4. Tried to connect from a mcdonalds. It did not work, It said connected to mcdonalds public wifi, and then nothing same as in no.2.
5.Got home and tried to connect to a wifi in the area to see what would happen, And sure enough, I could not connect, Well I could connect to the wifi, However I could not get iceweasel to connect to anything, even the hompage.
6.straight after, managed to connect to my home network, And here I am.
Now is this a problem? Why can i only seem to connect to wifi with passwords. (not so much connect, as once im connected getting things to work) I cant think of any reasons. apart from possibly some sort of backdoor but that would not make sense or maybe some ISP's block tor to companys?
The woman in mcdonalds said they had been having trouble with the wifi all day, But this does not explain the other bar and peoples unsecure networks.
What the hell is going on?
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As the woman at McDonald's said, it could be a problem with the individual wifi networks. Some are just crappy and hard to connect to. You could try connecting under Windows to see if the problem persists. The other possibility is that the Linux driver for your wireless card is buggy. The way to test this is to buy a wifi dongle that has excellent support under Linux and try to connect to those access points with it. You can find cheap USB wifi dongles for under $20 online. Search for reviews that say the product works great on Linux.
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Thanks spectrum. I will give it a shot and let you know how I get on :)
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Are you sure that #2 and #4 didn't just have captive portals? Those fantastic things usually found on public wifi where you have to click to accept terms and conditions before it'll actually stick you on the Internet?
If you're booting Tails on a network with a captive portal, you'll have to use Unsafe Browser to go click the little warning, then close Unsafe Web Browser once you're really online. i.e. open Unsafe Browser, type in any web address (because the captive portal will redirect you.. so you can pick cnn.com, google.com, whatever. Nothing shady.), then click the "I accept terms and conditions" crap.
Then close Unsafe Web Browser, and you should be up and running shortly after that. If it's still screwed up, reboot tails. Most captive portals remember you by mac address, so after a reboot, your Tails instance will restart the whole Tor+Iceweasel thing again and you'll be good.
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Are you sure that #2 and #4 didn't just have captive portals? Those fantastic things usually found on public wifi where you have to click to accept terms and conditions before it'll actually stick you on the Internet?
If you're booting Tails on a network with a captive portal, you'll have to use Unsafe Browser to go click the little warning, then close Unsafe Web Browser once you're really online. i.e. open Unsafe Browser, type in any web address (because the captive portal will redirect you.. so you can pick cnn.com, google.com, whatever. Nothing shady.), then click the "I accept terms and conditions" crap.
Then close Unsafe Web Browser, and you should be up and running shortly after that. If it's still screwed up, reboot tails. Most captive portals remember you by mac address, so after a reboot, your Tails instance will restart the whole Tor+Iceweasel thing again and you'll be good.
Hmm, No i was not sur about that at all, It would actually make a lot of sense. I will have to give it a shot and see how it goes. Thanks very much for the advice, This seems like a very plausible explanation.
The thing that really got me was the fact that it was connecting to the internet, yet tor via iceweasel was not starting up, It may well be this. Thanks
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maybe the places where its not working have a firewall that only allow web browsing ports (80,443 etc etc) to stop you doing things other than browsing ?
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Going to give it a shot tommorrow, We shall see how it goes, IF it is a problem due to captive portals i will let you know, Im not sure though. but it seems the most plausible explanation.