Open Networking

New10k writes "Here is a feature article on guys in Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere who are bringing the Open Source ethic to the idea of an available to all wireless Internet. Includes a short explanation of telco vs. free methods of providing access." I know folks who do this already, just not with permission (roam around cities with sniffers and find networks that aren't locked down ;)

Comments

HAM radio enthusiasts have been doing it for years

[HuskyDog]

HAM radio enthusiasts have been playing with long range wireless LAN for about 15 years or so. Its called packet radio and its what all the Amateur Radio stuff in your kernel source is for.

It seems to me that rather than trying to take wireless LAN technology which is realy designed for short range in-building networking and fixing it to big external antennas (which is basically what these guys are going), it might be a better plan to take technology from the HAM community and adapt it to these unlicenced bands.

The article is vague, but I very much doubt that these wireless LAN radios have the strong signal handling required to operate well when connected to a large external antenna.

Summary: An interesting idea, but one that needs as much imput from radio expert as it does from computer experts. RF engineering is not as simple as it sounds once you start dealing with a lot of signal over a large area.

G1DGL

"free"

[swagr]

"Free as in beer" software is not really "free as in beer". Someone has to pay for hardware, electricity, web hosting, whatever... So there is a cost, but it's so small that the creator is absorbing it, or perhaps ad banners or sponsors.

This is hardly free either: "$800 to buy all the components needed to get hooked up". (that's US) + maintenance + time.

Here in Canada I pay 40 bucks (Canadian) a month for ADSL or Cable (I've used both). My adsl connection will actually run 2 machines straight of the ADSL-modem (with a hub) (anyone with sympatico can do this).

So at that rate, this scheme might pay for itself after 2 years, but in 2 years I'll probably have a faster and cheaper connection anyways.

What about the FCC?

[megaduck]

Since this is obviously a big threat to large telecom providers like ATT, MCI, etc., I wonder if they will lobby the FCC to step in on their behalf. This kind of movement has happened before, most notably with micropower (around 1 watt) FM radio stations.
A couple of years ago, I became interested in setting up my own radio station so I investigated the FCC requirements for getting a broadcasting license. It turns out that the application fee for getting your broadcast license is several thousand dollars and the associated paperwork takes a team of lawyers to complete properly. Not only that, but the FCC won't even CONSIDER giving you a license if you're broadcasting at less than 100 watts. The equipment for that level of power gets pretty expensive for the average citizen. IMHO, these requirements don't benefit the public at all, it just artificially restricts broadcasting on the public airwaves to the big companies that can afford the price of admission. I suspect some heavy lobbying was involved...
I wonder if the large telecoms and their teams of lobbyists will try to get the FCC to step in on this...

900Mhz / 2.4Ghz IP networks and security.

[PureFiction]

These types of RF networks have been in use by companies for quite a few years (i.e. manufacturing data collection)

Like the TacoMan said, many of these networks aren't secured very well.

Half a dozen manufacturing plants that I integrated RF data collection devices for did not use any type of authentication of encryption and relied solely on frequency channels to identify remote RF terminals.

For a few hundred bucks, Intermec and others can provide you with ISA cards to tap into RF networks and even PCMCIA cards that you can plug right into your laptop.

These devices setup an IP connection that ties a psuedo terminal on a unix server to the ANSI/VT100/etc emulation terminal running on the data collection devices themselves.

Some of the newer models provide a light weight web browser configured for various ports on a unix server to handle the data collection interface.

Almost all (95%+) of the data collection applications that are attached to the other end of these RF terminals are running on critical enterprise servers so that they can be close to the databases they feed.

It always baffled me that the IS tech's would be so lax on security simply because it was 'RF'.

As a side note, eavesdropping on an RF network is orders of magnitude easier than typical networks (ethernet / ATM) and effectively impossible to identify. For a few hundred bucks anyone can make a RF 'tcpdump' with a laptop and RF PCMCIA card that will trap every single IP packet flying over the RF networks.

So, the moral of this story is:
RF entails much more security risk than typical networking. Beware when you implement an RF network, and keep security at the top of your to-do list.

Re:Tragedy of the common?

[Seenhere]

By the way, I'd like to hear more about cruising the streets with a sniffer looking for open networks. How's that done, and what does one do to 'lock down' the network?

It depends on what wireless technology you're using, but here in my own private geek compound I run Orinoco (Lucent) Wavelan Gold wireless cards in 128-bit RC4 encryption mode.

This is quite easy to set up under Linux using the wireless extensions to the standard pcmcia services . You will have a switch branch in your wireless.opts file that looks something like

# Default Lucent Wavelan IEEE
# Note : wvlan_cs driver only,
# and version 1.0.4+ for encryption support
*,*,*,00:60:1D:*)
INFO="Wavelan IEEE ad-hoc"
ESSID="Secure Network"
MODE="Ad-hoc"
CHANNEL="3" #2.422GHz
RATE="auto"
KEY="1234-5648-9abc-def1-2345-6789-ab"
;;
(No, that's not my actual key :). And note it's not the full 128 bits... the version of the drivers I have won't permit that, for some reason that I don't understand. But 104 bits is pretty good.)

Anyway, you definitely want to "lock down" your network, unless you are into to providing a public access point. Without encryption, it would be like having a hub on my DSL modem that anybody driving by could plug in to...

--Seen