Slashdot Mirror
Free Wireless For Fun And / Or No Profit
An Anonymous Coward pointed to this San Francisco Chronicle story about San Francisco's wireless networks there for the taking, set up for convenience but left open to anyone with an 802.11 card to grab packets, and in many cases, hop on the networks themselves. Sometimes that's intentional, other times it's not. The article mentions some of the well-known public wireless projects consume.net and Seattle Wireless, but what about your city? It would be interesting to find out and map where else folks have found (or founded) pockets of free bandwidth.
This is anonymous for a reason.
One of the problems with running an open wireless network (and Seattle Wireless thing which I have accidentally become part of -- see below) is "what if a bad guy starts using your network to do illegal things". Everything that goes out of your NAT router comes from one (fixed) IP address that has your name attached to it. So if you get an "unwelcome guest" who start using your network as a jumping off point what do you do if get the knock on the door from the police saying "we grabbed these from your network connection and we want to talk to you"? Tell them its not you but someone using your wireless connection?
I was made aware of this sort of problem a week ago on my own network at home.
I thought I'd closed down my Airport (make the network name hidden and use MAC address authentication to prevent other than my machines from attaching to my network) but I screwed up and my Airport has been running open since I got it last May (and I think of myself as a security expert). I noticed some odd activity on and off during this time (and put it down to AppleTalk being chatty) until last week I sniffed some of these HTTP request packets on my network. I didn't like the look of the URLs. Someone was using wireless access to my broadband network connection to download illegal content. Of course its difficult to trace something like this (the IP of the intruders machine is given out by DHCP from the Airport) and I don't have any direction finding gear for 2.4GHz.
I've since properly secured my Airport but I wonder if the people who are enthusiastically setting up an open to all metro scale 802.11b networks have fully thought through who will be responsible if something like this happens on their connection. You may see yourself as a free ISP but you may have problems convincing law enforcement of that if something like this happens to you.
Similarly what if you just don't know much about wireless networking and leave your system with the default settings. I wonder about the people who just buy and Airport and connect it directly to broadband net connections without closing it down.
I'm also convinced that if you want to put an 802.11b router in the open you need to put a firewall on it and maybe a proxy too and you should certainly log the packets that come over the WiFi connection. You might want to make your policy open to users of you connection (but how you might do this is unclear -- there is no infrastructure to do this yet).
...but wouldn't it be easier if you just collected the GPS coordinants of each base station in an online database? Now combine that with a gps equiped handheld...hey maybe someone could start an open wirless project. But then again I'm pobly just dreaming.
Maskirovka