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Airports As Secure As 802.11b
INO_Fiend writes: "SF Gate is running a story about how at both Denver and San Jose Int'l American Airlines has been using unencrypted wireless to connect the curb check-in with the rest of their networks. They tested this by grabbing a laptop and hanging around the airport. I guess I might finally have something to do with a laptop and a WiFi card the next time I fly..."
Changi International airport in Singapore has free access to the Internet over 802.11b in large parts of the airport. They also have modules with a bunch of power sockets and RJ45 jacks in the center of numerous desks in case you're low on power or limited to wired Ethernet.
Changi International rules in general, actually.
Why don't they just give the homes by the airport to deaf people?
It's no joke. My brother is profoundly deaf and he says the deaf community is totally clued into both cheap, airport-proximate housing and high-wage airport groundcrew jobs.
In fact, my brother works at the airport on the ground crew. When he first started his boss gave him a hard time about not wearing ear protection. My brother ended up showing him an audiologist report that indicated he needed SPL levels above 130 db just to get any registerable stimulus.
Actually, my sister is in that line of work. When you call it unskilled labour, she gets very aloof and explains that, since the job requires training, that it is not unskilled. Then I must inform her that training is given at McDonald's to flip burgers. Anyway, her pay is now $24/hour after working there yor 2 months.
They seem to think paying people a higher wage will cause spontaneous generation of competence...
I accidently connected to an AA wireless network in Dallas. This was way before 9/11. At first I thought it was a freebie for exec flyers, once i realized it was their business network i disconnected.
they had a dhcp server that assigned ip/dns to anyone that connected.
didn't even think about it again until i read this article.
Sorry, I am posting anonymous.
The airline that I worked at (until just after 9/11) had a similar setup. An average sized hub airport probably has roughly 1700 things with an IP address. To help out, I used a machine with arpwatch to help keep track of what was running and to monitor changes. About 5-15 times a week, I saw non airport workstation names and mac addresses of nic's that we did not have. Luckily we did not have anything with a DHCP server running or everyone of these computers would have fit right in. We had coverage at every ticketing area and every gate, not hard to get a good signal.
My purpose is not network security, only an installer and maintainer of the network and systems, so I made note of our insecure wireless network to our networking group and got nothing back. When I had left about a year after bringing this up, nothing had changed. With so many levels of IT support and groups of people protecting their specialized interests at the company, it was nearly impossible to find someone that could step back and look at more then what they were currently responsible for. I guess we needed a "wireless network security" position before anyone would care to address this.
I don't know what you would do once on the network. Sure you could sniff around but I doubt you would get anything useful from the scheduling and ticketing part of the traffic.