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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.
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/
Even worse - the joke is on you. You look again and see that they have your wireless access point listed there as having a T3 connection for anyone :)
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)
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".
I'm sure the military is flying their Apache's along 10 feet off the ground looking at the back of street signs trying to find someplace to land.
With a 30mm cannon, and a combo of hellfires and 70mm rockets, I think the answer is "wherever it damn pleases".
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.
I was working for a major tech company when it became "the big idea" amoung business units to purchase and deploy their own wireless access points. Needless to say, simply walk by or in to our company parking lots / campus and you had unrestricted access to the internal network. As we went through the process of getting a handle on this situation, we used to joke about how our competitors were just down the street... and say... has anybody noticed any new antenas on their building?
Somebody should go down to O'Reilly and draw the warchalk symbol for a slash dotted node on their building.
'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!
If it washes off when it rains, is it still vandalism?
Last I checked, vandalism was damaging or destroying property. Spraypaint or marker might be considered vandalism because it's permanant, but chalk?
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
nopr, you get caught chalking up somebodies building, its still vandalism.
If I wrote in big chalk letters on the side of your house "RAPIST INSIDE", I bet you would consider it vandalism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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
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
It means you are using a lame encryption method that hackers are definately gonna want to break in to. Actually it means Wire Equivalent Privacy or something like that, it's a MAC level security system. But it's busted.
...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.
I'm patenting it as you type.
Liberty uber alles.
Wireless only goes about a quarter of the speed of a t3 assumming an EXCELLENT signal.
[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
not according to Janes http://www.janes.com/defence/air_forces/news/jawa/ jawa001013_1_n.shtml
:)
Either way, I'm not gonna argue with one
WEP = Wired Equivalent Privacy. It's a wireless security protocol that was supopsed to make your wireless communication at least as secure as if it were running across an ethernet cable (but not necesarily any more so). It gets a lot of flak because it's not very secure; but it was never really intended to be.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"