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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.
Seems easier than trying to make out SSID's that are half washed away.
Choose the "reconfigure" option and go!
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
What is that supposed to mean?
"Breast viewing permitted from 1-5 pm only"
"Caution, cleavage overhead"
Bitchslapped. Neat.
I don't know to laugh or be afraid of this one:
http://www.tackamarks.freeservers.com/ - how street signs tell the military what resources are where.
I was trying to think up something suitably acerbic to say, but I can't. That's a damn slick idea, and I salute him.
So, won't it be interesting to look out your window and find one of these runes on the side of the building across the street...say, a rival company? There they are, broadcasting their secrets to the world. How convenient, you can just login from the window near your desk.
Hmmm...that reminds me...I should go check our Wireless configuration.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
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/
Bank! Pray tell. Did you know these poor cash machines?!?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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)
I was so shocked by this insinuation that I nearly dropped a handfull of beans!
Next Battleground: Freedom of Speech! Do I have the right to shout on a crowded street, 'Kynance, open node, 1-5' ?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Before you know it some poor geek is going to get beat down in urban Chicago by a gang because they think he's marking their "turf".
Reading this gives a nostalgic feeling of Lain...
kinda like when the wired and the "real world" is being blended together.
which, really, it's true. in a can-be-very-helpful-but-still-somewhat-creepy kind of way.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Wardriving,
Warwalking
Warchalking...
Warhopscotch
Warsitting
Wardrinking (If there's a glass with a coaster on top of it on the bar, there's an open WLAN)
WarSegwaying
Wargeocaching
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
As Matt's server screams in the dark London night, you could spell my name right...HammerslEy
Anyhow, the pic on Matt's site shows the rune to my wireless node. It's in Kensington, just round the corner from Imperial College. A T1. Help yourself.
You've been marked down as redundant. Either some idiot moderator marked you down because s/he is frightened by not knowing what you are talking about, or s/he DOES know, but hasn't got enough of a life to see the humor.
Either way, YOU WIN! I, who am about to be modded down as Off Topic, salute you!
Infuriate left and right
Why make a new word when "vandalism" already describes this activity?
Somebody should go down to O'Reilly and draw the warchalk symbol for a slash dotted node on their building.
And the judge said "So let me get this straight, you were arrested for geek graffitti?"
(Score: -1, Stupid)
'Were' being the word, here. I.e. they were open, they were visited, some exciting thing happened and their obit was printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Probably not so dramatic, but imagine someone doing a drive-by of Arthur Andersen or Enron and pilfering a few online documents...
You're concept also gives me pause to think about all the nuts who hang around old ruins in the world, e.g. Stonehenge, and feel there's some great power eminating from them... most likely they're markers of where (political) power was concentrated and is all used up by now. Ah, well, if they weren't oohing and ahhing and buying into some cult they'd probably be sending spam, too.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
(WiFi Logo Here)
www.domain.com/wifi
If you saw this on the side of a building, you should have enough to go on. If that site wants you to use their system, then the URL would point to a page telling you everything you need to know to share their system.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Amazing. 48 comments as of this post and no one has yet commented on the obvious: that these signs are nothing more than telling people where they can steal free bandwidth.
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.
This is F***ing ridiculous. Go buy your OWN damn access and stop taking others' just because you can.
...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
Nice neighbourhood, and embassies every six feet. The Kuwaiti and the Iraqi embassies were just down the street from each other on Queen's Gate and about a block away from each other. A friend of mine used to go to Imperial College during the Gulf War and said it was a pretty interesting street...
Carousel is a lie!
Won't the lusers unintentionally running wide-open nodes get suspicious when they see a chalk mark outside that says "LINKSYS )("?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
It seems that this is an interesting idea, but lacking in usability. There are two major problems as I see it.
1.) The chalk will be easily washed away, and the location lost. (not to mention they warn the local network administrators)
2.) You have to just walk around and randomly find one of these markings.
A better solution would be somewhere online that warchalkers could upload locations (GPS maybe) and then you could easily find the access point nearest you.
- RG
==================
Don't pet the burning dog
Don't pet the burning dog
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
I'm sorry, I live in London. That picture is in London. But what the fuck are you talking about?
Is this some annoying "west coast" bollocks again or what?
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Remember when IBM was hauled into court for marking up city sidewalks with the love/peace/linux thing?
Now we'll see love/peace/linux/<802.11b info>.
Free lov^M^M^MBandwidth for all!
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
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.
...is that you're more likely to be a victim of warchalking, than a beneficiary.
taking a pull from some ripple while reading slashdot
boy does that bring back memories!
Epoxy type paint works best. Very durable, resists solvents, and the pressure washer.
Guess you learn something new every day...
I thought those marks were "this road sign best if used by" dates.
-- Terry
THe people that IBM hired to do their "Guerilla Marketing" were *supposed* tu use a chalk powder; instead, they used paint.
The cities that got upset did so because of the use of *paint*.
They might be able to nail you for getting the building instead of the sidewalk, without banning Toys-R-Us from selling "sidewalk chalk", but woe to the little kid who draws on the side of his tenament, if that happens.
Basically, chalk is "mostly harmless".
"Contributory theft of services" might be an option... but it'd have to wait until after theft of services resulted from the marking (and they'd have to prove it was the marking, not just "war driving", that identified the victim).
There are actually a couple of obvious legal arguments on both sides (e.g. "I thought they put up the markings themselves" vs. "I was warning the admin"), wich could confuse things immensely.
-- Terry
Sorry to be the only one not to know what a WEP node is. Anyone care to help out?
Oh great, go around drawing on bits of other people's walls so it becomes a bit easier to leech off some third person's network connection.
If these people are so technically clued-up, why not use computers to do the work? Store the geographical information in a file and download it to your machine once a week or so. Then either use GPS or just type in the street name.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Ok, according to the PDF the number below the symbol is supposed to be the ammount of bandwidth the node in question has. So, just how many kbps is "1*5"?
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
...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.
Now they'll make it illegal for anyone under 18 to buy chalk too!
My name fits again.
I'm patenting it as you type.
Liberty uber alles.
Vampire markings, safe houses, blood banks etc. Will we be seeing people going around with their WiFi card make and model on the back of their necks?
limbo.
this is exactly something I was thinking about doing!
I already have one place to warchalk, and its gonna get bigger as time goes by. YAY, I finally have a reason to buy a nice wi-fi card
hee hee hee
--whats a sig file?-- >:-}
I think we all know that this would be a very bad thing to do.
Also, don't think that if you get "spray chalk" that it will actually wash away. I know that OSU students are probably familiar (Woohoo! ALTERNATIVE thingy on May 18th!) with this. Some of our Undergrad Student Government candidates spray chalked the sidewalks asking people to vote for them. The elections are long over and still, the plea remains. I think they won, so they don't look like *complete* idiots.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
[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
Hell, automate the process:
http://www.core77.com/reactor/tagmaster.html
Okay, not actually. Neat toy, but I'm all for impermanence in this case. Someone already pointed out the transient nature of nodes, and you don't want the tag outlasting its validity.
;)