Know what would be a great idea? Adding emoji to your wifi name to be that cool kid on the block.
Unfortunately most routers have “validation” and “error checking” so a handsome 💩 turns into %F0%9F%92%A9. What a shame. Pack your bags. Time to go home… Is what I would have said if I was afraid of gimping my whole wifi network.
DISCLAIMER: I am running Tomato Shibby on my router so your mileage may vary. Also I’m not responsible if you brick your router!
With that out of the way lets dive deeper and see what’s going on.
First off, lets visit the wifi editing page and clear the network tab of chrome to have a clean slate. Next I changed the name to my handsome poop emoji and saved again. While recording the network traffic I was able to see just how the router was saving the wifi name.
Tada, a neat little post request with the wifi name parameter. And it’s past all those silly validation checks.
curl 'http://192.168.1.1/tomato.cgi' -H 'Authorization: Basic sometokenHere' -H 'Origin: http://192.168.1.1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8' -H 'Referer: http://192.168.1.1/basic-network.asp' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data-binary 'lan_ipaddr=192.168.1.1 &lan_netmask=255.255.255.0 &lan_proto=dhcp &wl0_mode=ap &wl0_ssid=%F0%9F%92%A9 &wl0_security_mode=wpa2_personal &wl0_crypto=aes &wl0_wpa_psk=super%secret%20password' --compressed
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Next we just change the post data this for –data-binary field, “&wl0_ssid=%F0%9F%92%A9” parameter to”&wl0_ssid=💩“
Now copy that curl request into your favorite terminal aaaaaaand…
@msg:Settings saved. Some services are being restarted... jake@jake-laptop:~$
VIOLA!
Ok, so I know I gave you step by step instructions but…. Don’t. I know it sounds like a great idea at first but so did eating that tub of ice cream in less than 15 minutes.
After doing this I realized that my smart tv apparently doesn’t support connecting to wifi with emoji in its name. *Surprise* *Surprise*. Also my routers UI didn’t seem to like emoji in its “wifi name” textbox. This means that it sometimes threw spectacular JS fits with shifting focus randomly between DOM elements.
Whatever the case, I guess I’ll just have to settle on the name “Mr Weefee look at me” and hope for a day when all devices support wifi emoji connections.