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Wireless Clouds for Good and Ill
dr_delete sent in a story about Athens, Georgia joining the ranks of municipalities creating free public wireless networks. In a counterpoint to that, we have the Pentagon cracking down on wireless devices, trying to control information leakage. And Newsforge has a story about starting your own wireless ISP. Nifty stuff.
hmm, I havent ever seen a cloud tethered to anything, so I reckon we've had wireless clouds for a while now.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Y'know, ILL doesn't really work well in that font...
Just saying...
- sig? who is this sig of which you speak?
.. there is an active effort underway to build a national wireless network. It's over at consume.net. Unfortunately the uptake seems rather slow with too many people just interested and not active.
The BBC had a good story last week about warchalking which is a grass-roots effort to track down wireless networks so anyone can use them. Unfortunately the warchalking web site is no longer being updated because the owner, Matt Jones, wants to sell the domain and hand the project over to someone else.
Is that the number of secure wireless networks?
Anyone remember when a small group of people, disaffected with CompuSpend and other BBS corps got together and formed their own distributed network, based on private citizen's telco services? Wondering if the same thing will happen with medium-to-wide area networks? I mean, now that the 802.whateveritwas hack-thing is out there (you know, the one that lets you do wireless over medium-area distances), how long before people shuck off the "shackles" of their ISP and start forming small Winternet groups?
;-)
(Oh god, I might have just coined something. Quick! Alert Wired! =] )
The logistics of gluing small (urban?) 'clouds' together comes down to boundary-routing. Now, if only there was an 802.somethingelse hack that let these 'clouds' contact each other over inter-city distances, the Winternet wouldn't depend on Spring or Bellnexxia or whoever is backboning, today.
Cross your fingers.
.f00Dave
A quick read through that story shows nothing out of the ordinary. Anything that transmits something over air (cell phones, pagers, walkie-talkies, etc) is already banned from military and other government buildings, except in approved circumstances where the equipment was purchased by the gov't, or approved areas of certain buildings. I dont really see the "news" in that story.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
It looks like all the mid-sized cities are in a footrace. The City Commission wants to be an early adopter, and one vocal critic has been making some noise (sorry--no link b/c the local rag doesn't have the story in their web archive) even suggesting to demonstrate its vulnerability. How many repeats of this will we need before people start to pay attention?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
They may have to start raising local taxes for this.
When I saw the Pentagon mentioned along with a crackdown, I expected something about them cracking down on citizens. Instead it is simply about the Pentagon taking the wise move to curtail wireless WITHIN the military only use until they can be assured it can be used securely. That strikes me as a smart move, closing a hole that a terrorist or assassin might have otherwise used. Its good to see those in the Pentagon using their brains and thinking of interesting ways they might have security problems rather than having a tragedy happen first.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Step one, find geeky friends within community. Step two, convince them the T1 should be at your house. Step three, setup equipment, use wireless repeaters ect, make sure that when you actually order the T1, that you get enough IP addresses to avoid NAT Step four, assign your traffic as priority, with a maximum of 98% of the bandwidth, and claim you don't know what the problem is
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
You complain when corporations provide it, then you complain when the government does it. So who should provide it then? Internet access doesn't grow on trees you know.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Athens isn't the only place starting things like this. Valdosta State University has a wireless network spread out over most of the campus. Supposedly there is Wi-Fi being setup in Valdosta itself, nothing known whether or not it is a free service venture.
GA Tech also has a couple of projects going on here and here.
Georgia Southwestern State University also has an endeavour. As does the Medical College of Georgia.
I am a meat popsicle.
Didn't you mean for Good and 666?
Also, why don't they use the same line with guns. "The gun industry is inherently irresponsible because guns are inherently dangerous and insecure" or "The airline industry is acting irresponsibly because they don't have locks on the cockpit doors."
I think what many people fail to see is that originally, the internet was based on a trust system. It was more important to get data through then to protect them. That however has changed. However, we shouldn't tell the industry to stop innovating because of the potential for misuse. Wireless devices are a great leap from the wired networks of prior. And it is widely known that anything going over a public network is inherently insecure.
I would argue that this "cybersecurity advisor" really has no idea what he's talking about.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
President Bush's top cybersecurity adviser, Richard Clarke, said the technology industry was acting irresponsibly by selling wireless tools such as computer network devices that remain remarkably easy for hackers to attack.
The industry's most common data-scrambling technique designed to keep out eavesdroppers, called the wireless encryption protocol, can be broken -- usually in less than five minutes -- with software available on the Internet.
A few years ago, the U.S. government attempted to make all encryption crackable by government agencies by mandating key escrow or weak encryption. At one point, they even tried to jail Phil Zimmermann for creating and publishing PGP. Now they're berating vendors for making encryption in their products too weak and have become advocates for strong consumer encryption. Other countries that have had no encryption controls in the past are now trying to adopt key escrow requirements.
I find the reversal fascinating. Few easier ways exist to execute an electronic wiretap than to packet-sniff the subject's WiFi connection. I'm curious if there are internal struggles over encryption policy.
How is this at all counter to the preceding story? Though I think 802.11x devices are suitable for trivial and lightweight network traffic, I don't use it at home because of inherent security flaws (among other reasons). Similarly, I don't give out my credit card info over my cordless or cellular phones. Yes, fine, I'm paranoid though my needs for secrecy - as a private citizen - are relatively moderate.
However, I certainly don't see any reason why the US military shouldn't regulate the use of largely unregulated communications within its own sphere of influence. Seriously, these are some of the same people who modify computers for zero electromagnetic emissions. Why wouldn't they want to minimize the risks inherent in utilizing unsecured public bandwidth?
The problem is, despite the best of intentions, someone has to be in charge somehow. The reason you were able to have it set up by "the community" in a university is because that community was full of peopel who know how to do that. But in the wider community of say a city, there isn't enough expertise to go around, at least I don't think there is. I suppose if there were enough volunteers one could set this up, but you would have to find enough volunteers in that general area. You would also then have to find a way to pay for the equipment as well as the connection to the main internet.
Another problem is that, even in the universities, someone was in charge of this, and at some point they did start caring who did what, just try to log into Napster or any service which happens to use one of the popular Napster ports from a university and you will see what I mean.
The moral is, someone will eventually take control of the network and there is no way to guarentee that it won't ever happen. If we start with a community based system, eventually it will get taken over by either a company or local, state or federal government. If anything, it may be best to keep it in the local government because at least then it is easier to be heard than if it was all run by the feds, where only the rich are allowed to talk to the powerful.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Much as I shudder at the thought of nude Janet Reno pics going through my body, we've been have Nsync, Backstreet Boys, Michael Jackson, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern passing through our bodies for a long time now and as far as I know, no ones died from it yet.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Winternet were my dialup ISP before I got cable. They are still going.
--
E_NOSIG
Not an exageration. Indeed, there is a propensity for holding "Gun and Computer" shows in the civic centers of rural Georgia.
You may laugh, but the modern redneck knows computers like they know guns and trucks. And they were into HAM and CBs long before the teenybopper set learned the advantages of cell phones.
Of course, Athens isn't exactly a redneck Mecca. It's more like the Berkeley of Georgia.
As a graduate of computer engineering I sure would have loved to sit in the middle of downtown Athens (or on Bowman Field in Clemson where I went to school) and watch all the cute girls while having a remote X client window open to work on all my silly little projects. Of course, I may not have graduated then...
PS: The story is here too
~ now you know
The industry's most common data-scrambling technique designed to keep out eavesdroppers, called the wireless encryption protocol, can be broken -- usually in less than five minutes -- with software available on the Internet.
WEP actually stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy. It was intended as a means of ensuring that wireless users could have the same level of privacy as users using a wired network-- not as an secure communications protocol. (Of course, WEP does not even provide that level of "privacy").
Aren't there better privacy/security options available for Wireless devices?
"...trying to control information leakage."
It's worth noting that this was how we spied on the soviets for years during the cold war-- Through wireless phone communications before they learned that some of that stuff might be better off encrypted or left to land-lines. That and rigging their Xerox machines when they were first invented for photo duplication ^__^
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I'm currently sitting just within the edge of this cloud on Clayton street. Of course, I have no wi-fi devices to play with right now, but who knows....
I'm kind of surprised this made it to CNN, it's really underplayed around Campus, you don't hear a lot about it. Also, I'm wondering how toe UGA infrastructure will handle it, they are notorious for poor network performance despite MASSIVE bandwidth.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Since this is all being done by the Wireless Athens Group, is this all just an attempt to WAG the Dawgs?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ironically, it appears that not being allowed to share wireless internet access without having to pay a hefty licensing fee is helping to drive the growth of non-commercial regional networks in Australia. Most of the networks I've found in the states are for the purpose of sharing someone's broadband. I have yet to find one that is for a neighborhood network that is active and growing. I guess since we can get broadband access for so cheap here, we're not driven to building giant wireless LANs in order to get more bandwidth.
On a different topic, if you bridge access points, can you still control who gets to peer with your bridge? I'm thinking no, unless you filter out their packets, but maybe someone who actually knows how 802.11b works can give a definitive answer...
www.seattlewireless.net