I've got a friend who needs to change the MAC address (Media Access Control) on his iBook's airport card. How is this made possible?

You need a utility, though I dont know any for Mac.

to difficult to do.

That's an incredibly half-assed response and completely opposite to the kind of help that I need.

Here.

While the above seems to be able to change the MAC address, it's not so simple as that;

MAC addresses are assigned by manufacturers. They are the truly unique identifiers of network devices and there aren't supposed to be doubles. If you were able to change you address, you could have several devices on the same network with the same MAC address, which won't work.

Fuzzy he wants to change his MAC address not view it.

I said its to difficult to do because well it is. I have never heard of anyone able to do it so well meh? what you want from me I just kept my reply short and to the point "its to difficult to do"

He wants to change it to something random so he can connect to the network again. the networking people arbitrarily decided to blacklist the MAC address he was using.

I think we already tried that dialog at school. Seems that all it does is show the address.

you can spoof it with ifconfig, read the man page on it

p.s. it's not possible to change it and it's easy to spoof it

I didn't see that he wants to change it. Here you go.

I suppose spoofing would be the right term, then.
Fuzzy, that is only for ethernet... I think we tried that to no avail... Is there any way to do it on the AirPort?

This has to do with the kernel of the OS. If your asking this question you probably won't be able to do this.....here is the link though, good luck.
http://www.slagheap.net/etherspoof/

I am in no way a seasoned Darwin user and I'm betting my friend Sam will have no idea how to do that either. No hope?

Thats why WinMacLin is right. No, there is no hope.

If the network admins don't want him on their network, what you're asking is illegal

Not that I'm pointing fingers or trying to disuade you

Well, he could sell that Airport card and buy another one. That would be the easiest way.

its not illegal they have not taken out an injunction on him but it is unethical and they could seek legal action against your friend.

buy a USB WiFi adapter or a new Airport Card if you want on it so badly, but what's to stop them from blocking that also? what you want is an adapter with an adaptive MAC address system so that you can change your MAC address at will however I doubt you will find one for Mac and if you did it would post probably be in a form of a PCI card and since your friend is using an iBook that's just impossible to do.

The only real option you have is to gain access to the WiFi access point which is probably not out in the open and I'm gonna bet you would have to break the law to get to it.

Case in point: the people at my school are dicks, and the network sucks ass.