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Warchalking Visual Cues To Urban WLANs
elucidus writes "Matt Jones has put out a PDF and EPS outlining symbols to use in Warchalking the WLAN nodes of your community. Here's a pic. Ben Hammersly dubs them Hobo Runes." Brings to mind pictures of scruffy individuals around a fire with picturebooks, taking a pull from some ripple while reading slashdot.
During the Depression, hoboes used signs to signal where they could get a meal. Nowadays, geeks use signs to signal where we can get a decent 'Net connection. We're hungry, but we're informed.
/. fix.
Who cares about eating as long as I get my
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
If I was in charge of my company's networking I'ld be keeping an eye out for interesting chalk marks around my building....
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
Hey. That's not a bad idea!
Chalking is obvious, can be removed or altered. How about setting up a WLAN geocache site...users can update nodes via geographic coordinates. A cheap GPS and a printout of area WLAN's would get you pretty far.
Still...the chalking has a certain appeal.
...
...some PHB who can't stop these marks from appearing gets scared of having their files stolen by little geeks with butterfly nets outside the building, but who's too cheap to hire the talent or buy the hardware to secure their wireless network, starts telling his cronies to go out on their lunch break and draw these symbols up everywhere, thus negating their effectiveness.
Sort of a chaff-defence, but i'm pretty sure it would work...
lysergically yours
My job - before I retired - in the Canadian Army was armoured recce. We were the guys who went out in advance of the main troop body, looking for the bad guys so that the good guys with big guns could come kill them.
One of our other jobs was to survey routes and determine their suitability for passing military traffic. We would prepare "route reports" that would indicate widths, overhead clearences, the strength of the road surface (tanks chew up roads pretty quickly) and how much weight bridges could carry (we were taught techniques for inspecting bridges and making guesses as to how much weight they would hold.)
Certain types of "resources" would be noted on the reports, but they tended to be things like "gravel pit here" (for repairing roads torn up by tanks) or "harbour site here" (a good place to park vehicles off the route)
If anybody were to know about "secret peacekeeper sign codes" it would be us - and I can state categorically that there is no such thing.
There ARE some military signs around, but in North America they are temporary, not permenent. If you see a sign with a card suit on it, and an arrow (or sometimes a unit patch) that is a convoy route mark sign. It helps keep the poor non-recce types from getting lost while moving from one place to another, and they are removed once the convoy is complete.
In Europe, you'll see a lot of "bridge classification" signs that will have a tank, and a number, and possibly a truck, and a number. The number is the number of tons the bridge will support, the tank represents "tracked vehicles" and the truck represents "wheeled vehicles"
But these guys are absolute loons.
Feel free to laugh.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
My boyfriend, Mr. Weird Ideas himself, has actually proposed doing this in the SCA where jousting on horseback for real against live opponents is very much against the rules (shucky-darn; pells are just not as much fun)...
Never mind that Segways are totally out of period for the SCA, and more hype than use anyway...
--shakes head-- Sighhh...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
You should lock up your system "just because you can," otherwise, I'll snag a few packets of your bandwidth to check my e-mail via ssh and pine, "just because I can."
(notice the use of low-bandwidth methods, though.)
...because I am one of those people trying to seriously encourage community wireless and if that activity is seen to be some sort of cracker plot it will be damaged.
I want the local computer users near me to buy wireless cards and log into my node, they aren't going to buy the cards if they think somebody is going to use them to steal their data.
For the picture of the sign in the article:
7 64 501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34839&cid=3
http://www.benhammersley.com/wireless/
As for:
> Isn't anybody worried about a "tragedy of the commons" effect here? One or two people chancing upon an open WiFi link is one thing, but a systematic method of exploiting bandwith amounts to a denial of service attack upon the poor network that's targeted.
I have the same trouble finding sympathy for these folks as for folks running poorly-secured systems connected to the Internet who get 0wned. It's not like the security issues with a wireless network have been carefully hidden away - they're well known by now. If people continue to be careless, just as if they always leave their house or car unlocked, then there are people who will take advantage.
No, they shouldn't. Yes, they will. So lock your WLAN, and take your keys.
[snip]
This is F***ing ridiculous. Go buy your OWN damn access and stop taking others' just because you can.
This is not ridiculous at all, since the United States' cybersecurity czar said that these idiots deserve their fate:
"If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you ... deserve to be hacked."
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-840335.html
I'm sorry, but these morons desperately need a wake-up call.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll