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Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"
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I wonder if it would work in the UK, without the other wireless and electrical gear by the motorways interfering with it?
Escoutaire
When a dream dreams the dreamer, the dreams the real.
Yet a li'l bit frightening when you consider the implications...
I didn't even notice that it was another ad from O'Reilly.
I can't get enough of those stealth ads!
I have been pwned because my
Very amusing.. I especially like the fact that one of the guys was required online by his employer, while on the trip. Does this mean he can write off all the costs etc to his employer and get them to pay for it all? Nice little scam!!
- Chuq
"It was hard to tell but I think Emacs came out as the better utility vehicle."
Absolutelty hilarious. I'll go and read the rest of it now...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Or a geek blog?
http://review.lanwahn.at/php-cgi/gallery/view_albu m.php?set_albumName=autobahnwahn2002
here are some more pics from an highwaylan from austria (may not all of u understand german) but pictures say more than 1000words
Making a phone call from Pittsburgh to New York while both parties are coasting down I-70 in Illinois wasn't my idea of a smart move. I'd be more inclined to run into them to get their attention; it would have cost the same.
I guess this falls under "Everything I needed to know about driving I learned from Gran Turismo"...
slashdot!=valid HTML
What with all the traffic jams? It would be nice to have an open network for everyone to access when they're standing still or for your companions. Heck, I'd love to see this for the kids. Finally you don't have to tell them to shut up... just tell 'em to go on the internet or IRC. ^_^
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I'm suprised you didn't have a cam set up between the cars so you could video conference with each other. Cool idea!
So they had ot use talkd! AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
It's also amusing that they still bothered to use ssh between each other's machines. I say -- any cracker dude who figures out how to snoop on my 802.11b traffic at 85m/h deserves my respect and my passwords!
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
using a cell phone would be too expensive... .. and we used a cell phone to get online!!!
They were lucky. Otherwise it would be intervehicle accidents and high speed metal warping at 65 mph.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
..the result of Geeks with too much money (or stuff), too much spare time, and some hare brained scheme that they will make work.
god, it's beautiful.
mechanicos ergo cogito
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
You get the impression that he's proud of his hacking skills yet he probably thinks like a stoner when it comes to his driving skills 'i drive so much better dude when i'm stoned!'
Driving and reading don't mix.
Driving and typing don't mix.
Driving and Hacking don't mix.
Just Drive.
Course he'd have been a funny addition to the Darwin Awards:
'IDIOT HACKER DIES FROM SWAPPING MP3 WITH CAR IN FRONT- LAPTOP FOUND IN SMALL INTESTINE'
Let's hope he takes no one with him
Pity they didn't setup Voice over IP.
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
If they ever make this into a movie (goddam there should have been a video camera operator in each car too) the final scene would have been a closeup on the driver's smiling face at the Perl conference, with a voice over...
"Some called me lame, some called me cool, but they all called me geek."
Final theme music, roll credits.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
All was not lost, however, we resorted to remotely controlling Schwern's laptop to play random songs in the Passat and there was nothing they could do about it. I ssh'ed into my friends box acrossed the internet and did this, he got pretty pissed off
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
He wasn't "hacking while driving," he had a co-pilot. I don't see anything dangerous here.
"Meng rode with me in my Hyundai Tiburon acting as communications officer and uplink controller."
this fp dedicated to #teens on undernet
Hmmm... I remember logging in via ssh from a powerbook G3 onto university with a Ricochet Modem while riding as a passenger in a friend's car. I didn't have a second friend Ricocheting simultaneously, otherwise I could have done something similar. Supposedly, it's still possible to connect from one Ricochet Modem to another directly, and it could be done car-to-car without needing the Ricochet network. Aah, memories...
You can't use GPS data to decide how to form the network topology, because in order to echange the GPS data you will have to have the network already running.
Unfortunately, the amount of routing information that needs to be exhanged in ad-hoc networks increases exponentially with the size of the network and the rate of change in the network topology (mobility).
You're right in that utilizing location information could be used to optimize the routing protocol, and people are working on this, but it sill presents a formidable scalability problem.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Ooh, you lost to an ON TOPIC first post.. thats gotta hurt.
Instead of (correction, in addition to) geeking up your car with a wireless network just to turn a 1 day otherwize boring road trip into something more funny, buy a car you like driving ffs! I'd never switch my car with a VW with a wireless IRC interface.... :P
True ravers don't need drugs
On at least a dozen occasions, I've nearly been run over by idiots who are making left turns while yakking on their cell phones. I can hardly wait to have my life endangered by the same idiots as they try to drive and type at the same time.
[this
I did this way back in 2000 on a road trip
from Minuch to Cebit2001 in Hannover...
We didn't use/have Inetnet access (Cell Phone Costs), but we did have a simular network, but
with 4 cars. We got over the distance problem
by having high gain Omni's in all cars. We were
able to space the cars out up to 1/1.5 km. before
loosing the link.
PS: Yes we had navigators also.....
PPS: Our network was going 120MPH
(Gotta love Autobahns)
Dave did his PhD thesis on the idea of routing packets between a bunch of wavelan cards moving all over the place. If you play up the military side of it (imagine every soldier/tank with wavelan, routing packets between them!) DARPA likes to fund this kind of stuff.
Anyways, the most fun was had when Dave and his colleagues rented a fleet of cars, put a wavelan equipped laptop in each one (since this was a while ago, they were using the original 2Mb wavelan, not this 802.11b stuff), and were driving all over Pittsburgh trying to see how well packets would get through between cars....
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
:-).
VoIP would have spared them the jargon, too. No need to remember silliness like 'breaker one five' and 'ten four good buddy', as well as some of the more silly mutilations of common english words in a (mostly failed) effort to make them sound more official, or technical (an example of such is in the subject line
Course, if they were going 95 instead of 65, they would want to know where all the 'bears' are hiding...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
... may act like 800-lb. gorillas but it's highly unlikely that they act like
"800-lb. guerrillas" as the article states...
This nitpick may be minor, but it really does make a world of difference in the semantics.
But at 90mph on I-10 from Phx to LA. Crossing state lines.
Border Guard="Your reason for coming to california?"
Driver="The Cheese!"
Equip: 4 laptops
2 APC 800 Ups'
oh and of course a PS1 w/ LCD
.. but he said that using a cell phone while going down I-70 wouldn't be a smart idea. He made it sound like it wasn't safe... but apparently using IRC while driving is...
Like playing halo at 70mph?
Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill
I'm not a big enough geek to ever do something like this but I am a big enough one to have laughed my ass off during most of that story. I think the best, most telling line is: "Still later in the day we decided to stream MP3's from one car to another."
It's so casual but when you stop to think about it... d'oh!
I am a big fan of creative people, no matter what industry or field and this is a perfect example of creativity in the geek world.
Oh no! I've been the victim of a drive by hacking! :-)
It would save them the time of setting up the network and the networks cost. But o well it sounds cool. Could I have their vechiles for five dollers?
This was written to use up your time hahahssa alaahsdhaj asdjfkjafjkfsd gsdd.dsgfsg gf.fs dsf dfdfds gffgfd
But the main connection to the Internet was the phone and that is expensive in the U.S. If the prices were instead reasonable, they could have used GPRS or something similar. "yous" there on the East Coast could have a better cellphone pricing model. A commitment to standards and reasonable pricing for cell phones would be a boon for mobile computing in the U.S.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The club is getting smaller every day in IT world. It's come down to articles like "Bored rich guy takes his toy to his luxury vehicle". I am so impressed I can't believe it. Here's a preview of next week's postes-du-jour:
* CTO admits he doesn't know what the T stands for
* Check out this neat MindStorms doorstop
* eBay to allow slave auctions - submit your IT resume
* Economy, Schmeconomy - at least I'm still rich
These guys aren't geeks, they're idiots... and they still used the damn cell phone.
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
I really hope that someone at Amtrack reads this. Seriously wireless broadband, especially on the Northeast Corridor Accella could be their killer app.
From Richmond to New York... We where on our way Mac World New York... We had a single Airport Base stationa and several laptop with Wave Lan cards... we played Star Craft. But we where all in one van.
so lets see, between the laptops, the WAP, the inverter, 2 powerstrips(?), cell phone, etc... ...he tripled the value of that POS Hyundai? :-)
If he was operating that laptop while driving, that is extremely dangerous- at highway speeds, cars travel over a hundred feet a second, and it takes about 2-3 seconds from the time you take your eyes off the road to when you get focused back on the road, to check something out on the screen- much less READ something.
Maybe the guy should have just gone and bought a $50 CB radio. Or a Talkabout. I can understand a GPS unit and map software(esp for finding places to stay/eat) if you have a co-pilot, but if you're solo, leave the laptops in the trunk and DRIVE THE FUCKING CAR.
Ever seen the bumper stickers that say "SHUT UP AND DRIVE"?
It's the passengers that surf, change mp3s, etc..., not the driver! Are you gonna tell me it's unsafe for kids to read comic books in the back of the station-wagon from Thunder Bay to Regina? Or that movies shouldn't be allowed on planes because they might distract the pilot?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
they spent all that time and money just to *chat*?
:)
:P
I've thought of doing this before, but not to chat. Obviously, a few games of warcraft III, counterstrike, etc on the road would be a lot of fun
Anyone have a satellite connection to the net on their car?
This is saddly, a non event. With one Mac laptop with an airport card installed, you can turn on "Software base station" and that mac becomes your wireless hub.
Turn on personal web and file sharing and put a 1 hour mp3 mix on your web folder. Have the other guy on a pc or mac in the other car, plug their audio output into their car stereo and you have audio streaming over wireless from car to car.
Why throw a linksys into the mix when you don't need it?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I'm finding myself terribly amused by all the other people with laptops they must have passed during the drive, who suddenly found themselves with internet access.
I always thought that the point of War Driving was to find 802.11 sources on the open roads, not be one.
Maybe we need to refine the definition a bit. I guess the old way could now be considered "Defensive War Driving."
Actually, this is not the first use of 802.11 on the highways by any means. Several universities around the country have been experimenting with 802.11 for vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications. Imagine a world where vehicles communicate between each other through wireless networks to prevent collisions. So maybe it won't happen tomorrow, but it's coming and the early implementations are using commercial off-the-shelf systems such as 802.11.
If I ever get to the point where I'd call a roadtrip passenger in my X a "communications officer", you have permission to shoot me. Shoot me dead.
Kineska: Cinema, soapbox, music & musings
On a recent road trip from LA to Las Vegas, my friend and I discussed the possibility of setting up a mobile short-range "radio station" for a caravan of cars using one of those personal FM radio transmitters you use to listen to your 1/8" jack-equipped audio device in a car, such as the awesome iRock. We dreamt of a "DJ" seat in someone's backseat with a laptop and music software (i.e. Ableton's Live or an MP3 mixing app), and the other cars tuning into the station to listen to a set. Then, when it's time for a gas/bathroom break, someone else gets to play DJ! Could be fun...
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
This reminds me of our drive to h2k2 last month. on the way to the trains tation, we ran an LPFM broadcaster in our car (driven by a minidisc player). We drove through connecticut with a sign in the window that said something to the effect of "107.1 FM w00t?"...
/me lix mobile pirate radio for hackers... to bad we didnt have a mobile radio show with the mic/preamp that we had.
ironically, we attended the LPFM talk at the con itself, which was pretty good.
http://siokaos.org/
The writer was very creative in his use of off-the-shelf equipment. His experiment is a good proof-of-concept.
Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators have been communicating via packet radio for something like twenty years. Since ham radios are used, the range is measured in miles rather than feet. The only drawback of that system is that the speed is limited to 1200 baud -- though higher baud rates are used on some of the higher bands. In fact, some hams use tcp/ip as their protocol (originally, packet radio used ax.25).
For more information, check out news:alt.ham-radio.packet.
Digital radio communication is actually much older than even packet radio. Technically, morse code is a digital medium. Somewhat later, baudot code was used, and hams communicated via RTTY (Radio Teletype). I'm not sure when the first RTTY station hit the air, but I suspect that it was in the 1940s or 1950s. Later, ASCII was used for RTTY, which had the advantage of lower-case letters and more characters.
Packet Radio became popular in the 1980s, and the innovative hams used it for emergency communications, bulliton boards, email, and vehicluar communication. Some attached GPS units to the TNCs (Terminal Node Controllers), so a central station could track several mobile units. This turned out to be very useful for "fox hunting" (searching for hidden transmitters), and the more serious searches for emergency locator beacons and for illegal transmitters.
The police have been using a form of packet radio for at least ten years, and probably for a whole lot longer (I saw one ten years ago). Rather than calling your license number into the dispacher, they can type it into the terminal and get a direct text reply.
The military also uses wireless digital communication. They used RTTY way back in the ancient times when I was serving (no, we didn't use flintlock rifles). I used to repair the encryption devices that secured the links.
The author expressed some doubt about securing a wireless link, but I am confident that any communication that the military is currently researching is well secured. They have been using crypto gear for a very long time. Rather than take a chance on being accused of divulging classified information, I will just suggest that you type "comsec crypto" into google and surf from there.
The point is that once you encrypt the data, you can send it over any channel you like without fear of eavesdroppers.
Incidentally, hacking the 802.11 box to produce more power is almost certainly illegal. The FCC takes a dim view of unlicenced people modifying type-accepted gear.
I haven't researched the issue, but I believe that a ham can legally modify an 802.11 box. I am quite sure that it is legal if the operating frequency is moved to one of the ham bands (I don't recall if it is already in a "shared" band). Doing so will create other issues that I won't bother to get into right now, though.
One final word of advice: Move the antenna OUTSIDE the vehicle. It'll work a whole lot better.
Let's see, WAP "281-bc2" is northbound while WAP "192-kee" is southbound... With some pretty advanced signal strength metering combined with directions (electronic interfaces to compasses are cheap, some cars already have them) might negate the need for GPS.
But since we'll be some distance (!) from a cellular network, we'll have to use satellite dishes. They'll be mounted on top of the trucks and will give us somewhat more bandwidth than a cellphone. If this come's off, I'll post to /. from Dadanawa Ranch.
Now,I'll need a bit more than 150 watts of AC power to get all this running. Maybe a small diesel genset atop the truck...
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Can you imagine how confused this would make all the cops trying to mark chalk on the tires for parking fines?
"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...you're gonna see some serious shit."
or
"If we drop below 50mph the hub will explode!"
damn right. we need some geek pride movies! i mean, thers office space and whatnot, but i want to see some movies with *nix jokes, damnit.
There's something to be said for elegance.
2 + iBooks with Airport cards - stow the base station hardware and the inverter and drive for 6 hours a day MAYBE needing the lighter direct power adapter outside of that. Stay within a dozen car lengths.
I'm wondering what made them leave the 19" CRT at home...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
But i was wandering whether you could just do this with 2 Macs with Airport cards inside? or heck, 4 macs with airport? or do u need a hub? I understand that it possible to do this with only 2 macs, but can anyone correct me if i say its possible with >2 Airport cards?
Also, what about Bluetooth? Also, on mac, the bluetooth adapter can enable 2 macs to also communicate/share. I got that from the article I read off their website some time ago, so the facts might be wrong. hehe. :)
Fight Crime - Shoot Back!
This is the niftiest thing I have ever seen.
I'm going to try this on my next roadtrip. I keep my NB plugged into the car when I do my daily 32 mile commute. It's a nice way to pass the time in brutal afternoon traffic.
Big Dave Diode? I just had a bloom county flashback regarding hacking. Which also coincided with me getting 'picked up' by Fidelity Investment security 13 years ago for taking inept whacks at their PBX systems. Oops. I better get off Big Daves bunk.
Hey, if they wanted to cut out the cell phone costs they could have always gone with a cable LAN! Sure, the drivers would have to pay attention not to snap the cord, and probably piss people off behind them who can't pass them, but hey, it would be cheaper!
Ever consider one of these for your project? There are lots more, but if you could hack one of the DISH/DirecTV dishes with Internet access that will gyroscopically keep it pointed at the bird, you might be on your way.
....Of course, multiplayer Q3 is out of the question. ;)
We set up our own nominal wireless LAN during a company road trip to a tech kitchen in another metropolitan area about 2 hours from ours. This was, uh, almost 18 months ago when 802.11 was just beginning to go mainstream. And to top it off we had a Mac in one car and a Windows 2000 laptop in another - and got them to see one another and play some networkable games... So what's the big deal here?
1. Have the AC inverter, wireless AP, and hub in the trunk. 2. Have the antenae outside of the car. ..then it would be much cleaner and possible better preformance.
The word "geek" doesn't quite do the man justice here. There a distant line that one crosses, a line that, for most, is so far beyond the visible horizon that it can only be imagined. That line is known to psychiatrists and researchers as Techno-Hallucinogenic Obsession (THO).
Symptoms of this affliction vary. The primary one is a complete focus on one's project wearing blinders so tight that one often forgets simple details (eg. forgetting to download a chatd), or one of the primary project motivators (eg. saving money on cell phone charges). Other symptoms include bottom-up planning (eg. spending 100 miles trying to think of things to talk about) and a sense of false importance (eg. sending out coordinates via email). Scientists have found only two temporary cures so far: falling in love and becoming a manager.
THO: Damn, I miss that feeling.
P.S. Emacs probably *is* the best vehicle for the job.
My highschool Shackleton spends about 1/2 a year on the road. We have iBooks with wireless. We drive big school busses across the country, where a lot of productive work could be done. So I put together a wireless fileserver consisting of an airport basestation, a quantum snap drive, and a 5 port 10/100 switch (for wired connections, backups, etc.). Attach that to a UPS and then to an invertor, and students could work on the server from any laptop with a wireless connection, no more worrying about which laptop they saved their files on.
It was originally a p90 with 48 megs of ram and a crossover cable to the basestation. I would have loved to use a SBC with a wireless card and a laptop drive for better size / power usage, but I didn't have the time for a custom hacked job, which I didn't want to have to support when I graduated.
"It's 800 miles to St. Louis. We got a full tank of gas, five laptops, fourteen operating systems, 802.11 and a cellphone, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
"Hit it"