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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.
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/
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.
Somebody should go down to O'Reilly and draw the warchalk symbol for a slash dotted node on their building.
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
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
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
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
They already have that. Now, imagine you're walking down the street and you need to find an open system. You can't check the web to find one because you need to find one to check the web. This is supposed to be a solution to the problem. (although netstumber/ministumbler would be fine too)...
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.
...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.