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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.
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 Unfortunately the warchalking web site is no longer being updated because the owner, Matt Jones, wants to sell the domain and hand the project over to someone else.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?"
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
I dont own a car... I can walk or ride my bike everywhere I go. Why should my taxes go to pay for other people's transportation (roads)?
Because people agree that roads are needed even though not everyone uses them. Same goes for this. If enough people agree that its needed then it doesnt really matter if you want/need it... youll be paying for it either way.
Do you eat or consume anything that comes from more than 2 miles from your domicile? Ok then you use roads. Fresh OJ from florida or california, bananas from central america, wheat from kansas, milk from cows in ohio, eggs from who knows where, maple syrup from canada. And that was just for breakfast! We are all benifieries of the modern transportation system that is made possible by the interstate highway system. Besides much of the money comes from gasoline taxes which you don't pay for directly unless you use the roads (you of course pay for it in the cost of goods purchased but then that is fair because getting the goods to you used the roads.)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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
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?