War Driving With The Kids

burntfungus writes "War Driving on Vacation with your kids. A drive from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo's Gum Alley (yes, it's bubble gum on the wall), then on to San Francisco. Hundreds of 802.11b Access points available for mapping with Netstumbler. Some in the middle of nowhere."

Comments

Security Question

[utdpenguin]

Just something that occurs to me, but if it literaly so easy to get into a company's network, can they really be said to have any expectation of privacy? If you shout something outloud in public you have none, it's perfectly legal for anyone to overhear you and act however they wish on that info. Is this significantly different?

Re:Security Question

[mikey504]

Just because it is easy doesn't mean it is legal. I am not a lawyer, but I believe the Electronic Communicastions Privacy Act (http://floridalawfirm.com/privacy.html) expressly prohibits the "interception and disclosure" of various forms of electronic communications.

It is against the law to eavesdrop on phone communications, for example, with a scanner. Since +/- 1994 scanner manufacturers have been forced to modify their scanners to skip the frequency ranges commonly populated by cellular telephone traffic.

Also, I believe the law differentiates between snooping an analog signal and snooping a digital one because it could be argued that this signal is "scrambled or encrypted".

Since you need (more) specialized equipment to decode the digital signal and the setup is nontrivial for most folks, you would have a tough time claiming you "accidentally" intercepted LAN traffic from XYZ Corp.

Of course that may not help them once their sensitive information has been leaked to the press or the competition, but it would be naieve to think that you wouldn't be prosecuted if you were caught.

Re:Security Question

[utdpenguin]

Ok, but look at it this way. You have you own wireless network. Your all set up for it. Your a windows newby and someone has set it up automaticaly to connect ot whatever network is available. The building next door also has a network. Given the large precentage of peopel who have a computer but no clue how to use it, it wont be long, if it hasnt happened already, until people are simply ont he wrong network, innocently enough. This would be the equivalent not of using a scanner but of having the guy on the cell phone, next tabel over at a restaruant, yelling so loud you can't help but overhear without taking measures yourself to insure his privacy.

Re:Security Question

[stripes]

You have you own wireless network. Your all set up for it. Your a windows newby and someone has set it up automaticaly to connect ot whatever network is available. The building next door also has a network. Given the large precentage of peopel who have a computer but no clue how to use it, it wont be long, if it hasnt happened already, until people are simply ont he wrong network, innocently enough

Sure, I can see someone innocently turning on their laptop and using someone else's bandwidth to fetch email and surf the web, but that is a far cry from sniffing the other people's traffic!

Re:Security Question

[ZoneGray]

More to the point... if you connect to an unsecured network, you're a damned fool if you expect any privacy... regardless of what the law says. As soon as you check your e-mail through a non-WEP connection, anybody in the neighborhood can have your POP password. I've often wondered what it would be like to set up an AP with an SSID of "public", and run tcpdump on what comes through....

...on _vacation with your kids_

[heyetv]

yet again, slashdot defines "geek".

Huh?

[webword]

Is it just me or did this posting make no sense. Driving, Bubble Gum, Vacations, War, 802.11b, and so forth. Do I have to actually click on the links to figure it out?

Re:Huh?

[Rob Parkhill]

Well, for those looking for a translation without actually reading the story...

"War Driving" refers to the practice of driving around town with a laptop and an 802.11b car looking for and mapping the location of wirelass access points. A GPS is helpful to let you know where you are.

I have no idea where the name "War Driving" came from, though. "Wirelss Access Recon" perhaps? :-)

Re:Huh?

[Zocalo]

I have no idea where the name "War Driving" came from, though.

It's a corruption of "War Dialling", which is the brute force approach of finding modems to compromise by sequentially dialling all the telephone numbers in a range. Used most effectively in the film Wargames since I guess you haven't seen it.

Gum Wall???

[the_argent]

Ewww..
You took your kids to what looks to be a narrow, gum plastered alley for vacation?
What's next the world's largest abattoir?

argent

This makes always good news.

[leuk_he]

It always makes good media to (re)post about broken wireless networks that could be accessed from anywhere. Lots of dead tree magazines are writing about this.

Who says he is not detecting freely accesable networks that are made to be public. /. reported about this part my times before.

Re:This makes always good news.

[Zocalo]

Who says he is not detecting freely accesable networks that are made to be public

He almost certainly was detecting them, the point is made about every Starbuck's in the article, but even if the networks are for public access, they probably should have more restrictive access and do not. After all, I'm sure that Starbuck's would prefer you to buy a coffee and danish to "pay" for your use of their public connection, rather than sit outside in your car.

Also, having taken a more leisurely cruise around likely candidate sites for 802.11b compromises (hi-tech business parks) I can state for a fact that the majority of wireless networks are begging to be compromised by someone with a darker shade of hat than mine... One other statistic I drew was that the bulk of these unsecure networks are running under NT, which explains a lot.

Re:This makes always good news.

[leuk_he]

starbuck.

I was not aware of the starbuck network. google turned up this. It states you have to logon (and pay ) to use their network. I suppose the car is also good for them if you have to pay anyway.

By the way: I was disappointed when i went on vacation to california this summer about public internet access. I found:
-public libraries: 3 out of 4 times there was a waiting list. (reserved days ahead)
-something at a gas station in palm springs.
1 (1) internet cafee at the las vegas strip.

A friend went to peru and in almost every small village they had public (not free) access.

For those who don't know what "war driving" means

[jodonn]

like me a few minutes ago, here's a link to a Register article about it.

Netstumbler is broke, try www.webs0r.net!

[punkball]

Since netstumbler's web shat the fan you should all go check out www.webs0r.net instead. A patch to wlan and then some scripts make wireless discovery easy.

Enough about this.

[ejaytee]

OK, this is the how-many-eth article about how 802.11b networks are poorly administered?

We've had /. War Driving in NYC, Hoboken, Washington, Minneapolis, and, now, War Driving on vacation articles.

I think everyone gets the point. No need to keep hunting for Yet Another Angle.

The only thing this story adds is the amusing reference to childen and car-seats in PCI-card terms (insert and remove the children from their seats).

The old complaints change..

[toupsie]

Oh great! Instead of "Are we there yet?" its now "Are we in range yet?".

We also get.

"Mommy, Timmy is hogging all the bandwith".

"Don't make me come back there and pull out your Airport card, Timmy."

802.11 access pt

[brarrr]

Crap - Here at cal poly in San luis obispo, my little airport network is going to get some freak slashdot effect and instead of everybody not seeing a site, I won't see any sites.

On top of that there will be 50 geek cars parked infront of my house mooching bandwidth.

Re:802.11 access pt

[anotherone]

>> On top of that there will be 50 geek cars parked infront of my house mooching bandwidth.

This is where you break out the eggs.

Re:Sounds fun but...

[don_carnage]

I've said it before -- let's combine the two sports: Geocaching and Wardriving. "There is a cache on an NT network at these coordinates. Take a file if you want, but please be sure to leave something in return.

I just had my first wardriving experience

[Nerftoe]

A couple weeks ago, I bought an Orinoco Gold access card, downloaded netstumbler, and had my homemade Pringles antenna ready to go.

The wife and I got out last Sunday to see if I could find any access points. We live a few files from Indianapolis, so I figured we would have to go downtown to find any access points. NOT TRUE! Many of the APs we found were on personal home networks. Every time we would pass an apartment complex.. blip!.. an AP or two would show up. Where they encrypted? Heh, no. We made one loop through downtown Indy and came back to our house and we found 40 access points. 5 were encypted.

So, we found one near a Mr. D's (grocery store). We stopped in the parking lot, I set up my Pringles antenna, and browsed the web via someone's @home connection. Really cool!

You can imagine the looks that I received when passersby saw me scanning back and forth with a pringles antenna, wires coming out of it, and a laptop on my lap. Anyway, wardriving is fun for the whole family. It's kinda like Geocaching, but quite a bit easier. :)

Re:I just had my first wardriving experience

[IvyMike]

You can imagine the looks that I received when passersby saw me scanning back and forth with a pringles antenna, wires coming out of it, and a laptop on my lap.

This is the point at which you look the passersby in the eye and say, "ghostbusting."