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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."
yet again, slashdot defines "geek".
like me a few minutes ago, here's a link to a Register article about it.
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.
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.
We also get.
"Mommy, Timmy is hogging all the bandwith".
"Don't make me come back there and pull out your Airport card, Timmy."
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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.
to email me: take my
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.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
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.