Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Is connecting a Windows computer to your wired network worse than keeping it on Wi-Fi? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm not that knowledgeable on networking, but I do remember that if a device is connected to a wired network, it can end up receiving packets not meant for it because switches will flood all the ports for packets they don't know how to route. But I also heard that Wi-Fi is supposedly smarter than that and a device connected to it should never receive a packet not meant for it.

Is this true? And in practice, does this mean it's preferable should keep computers with invasive operating systems (which might decide to record foreign packets sent to it in its telemetry) on Wi-Fi instead of on the wired network?

Also, how exactly does Wi-Fi prevent devices from receiving the wrong packets when it's a radio based system and any suitable antenna can receive any Wi-Fi signal? Does each device get assigned a unique encryption key and so is only capable of decrypting packets meant for it? How secure is it actually?

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[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Also, how exactly does Wi-Fi prevent devices from receiving the wrong packets when it’s a radio based system and any suitable antenna can receive any Wi-Fi signal?

Your device, say an iphone, has a MAC address. It sends a request to the Wi-Fi access point. The Wi-Fi router also has a MAC address and responds with a packet that contains the destination MAC address (your iphone). All devices listen to all Wi-Fi signals but only processes packets where the destination MAC matches its own. If the MAC doesn’t match, it ignores the packet. This happens at the data link level or commonly referred to as Layer 2 of the OSI model.