Update 2: It looks like I misunderstood what Steve was talking about. Update 1: As a companion article, Joel Spolsky talks about the trials of turning off Windows Vista. In conclusion, if you are ever responsible for designing the "turn it off" use case, please consider the above mentioned comparison before completing your design.
Steve was talking mostly about WiFi radio emissions, but since most Macs have Bluetooth these days, I thought I'd go a step further and document how to turn off Bluetooth radio emissions as well.
This guide applies to at least the last 3 versions of Mac OS X. If it's not clear, the step by step instructions for how to turn off WiFi are located at īecause Steve didn't mention how to do this on the Mac, I think I'll take the liberty of providing a comprehensive guide complete with pictures, so you can follow along. They assume (and require) that the system has been updated with the Wireless Client Update for XP as described in episode #82 and notes. Here's a link instructions to the instructions from Security Now:įor details on "Maintaining Full Radio Silence" from Windows WiFi systems, please see the updated show notes for episode #81. And so it turns out that following the instructions that are now on the show notes for 81, with the update which we talked about in 82, which we’re all pulling together now in 83, when we first opened the topic in 80, we basically snuck in a whole Security Now! episode on maintaining full radio silence." If we forget to disable our Wi-Fi, we don’t want it sending out stuff of any sort. We want to be able to carry a laptop around. LEO: Yeah, that’s a good way to talk about it, yeah. And so anyway, the idea is – in fact, I realized, okay, I started using the term “maintaining full radio silence.” LEO: Is this ad hoc only? Or is it infrastructure networks, as well?
And so if the networks are not broadcasting, then your computer does. There’s a box which enables it to connect to networks which are not broadcasting.
LEO: So this is if you installed the patch that Microsoft offered in November to fix wireless zero config, it’s still promiscuous unless you uncheck this box. So Episode 81’s show notes are enhanced with this additional information, and this episode links back to those. People can, if they go to the show notes for this Episode 83, I’ve got a link back to the new and enhanced instructions that are over now on Episode 81’s notes. So here in our fourth serialized How to Get Wi-Fi Just to Shut Up, we have additional instructions. It turns out that it’s trying to do that still, even after you’ve got the update, because Microsoft added a checkbox to one of the configuration dialogues which is checked by default, and you have to go turn it off.
Then the week before, Episode 81, we talked about – we actually showed the dialogues required to turn off the functionality, just sort of this promiscuous connect-to-anything-that-I-hear, and also this idea of broadcasting the names of any networks you had connected to before, which by default Windows tries to do. And if you didn’t hear last week’s episode, you should absolutely download that update. LEO: Well, it started when we were talking about this Free Public Wi-Fi that pops up on Windows from time to time, and what it was, and how now Microsoft has offered a fix but never told anybody about it, and you have to explicitly download it. We’ve basically snuck in an entire show on maintaining full radio silence on Windows WiFi. I was just listening to the most recent Security Now Podcast episode 83 wherein Steve Gibson goes to pains to describe what it takes on Windows to turn off your wireless hardware.