Warflying: San Diego

geogeek6_7 writes: "WarFlying over SanDiego reveals hundreds of WAPs, and some very interesting statistics. There is a second write up of the same adventure at the pilot's personal website. All this of course should not be confused with that 1500ft 'WarDriving' effort in Australia."

Comments

Obsessive

[Skyshadow]

I don't get this obsession with finding WLANs.

Okay, there are a lot of wireless access points out there. Okay, many of them aren't secured very well (if at all).

So what? Why is it worth so much effort to reillustrate this point over and over again? Sure, Wardriving was a neat concept the first time someone pointed it out, but this is just more of the same thing. What's next? Wartraining? "Look, we got on these wireless LANs while riding the El in Chicago! Why the hell do we have to obsess on this over and over again? This has been overdone to the point where I'm sure we'll see a UserFriendly strip about it!

Okay, rant over. Sorry.

Re:Obsessive

[crow]

If only I could get a grant to fund doing this sort of "research." I want to do war sailing. I intend to chart all the unsecured access points I can find in the middle of the ocean.

Garage door war driving...

[Radi-0-head]

When I was a kid, my friend's mom was a realtor. We learned that when houses were put up for sale, most of the realtors set the dip switches in the garage door openers to a few easy combinations: on,off,on,off,on,etc... or the first half of switches on, the second half off, or vice versa.

Armed with this information, we took a few common brands of garage door opener (Genie, MultiCode, Sears, etc.) and set them to these combinations. We then hopped on our bikes and started riding around the neighborhood clicking the buttons. You wouldn't believe how many garage doors opened.

I sort of drew a parallel between unsecured WAPs and these unsecured garage doors. It was remarkably easy to do. Most people have no clue how to change the dip switches on their garage doors, just like most people have no idea how to change the default SSID, disable SSID broadcasts, and enable encryption.

Because of what I learned about the security (or lack thereof) of the typical garage door opener, I now have a much more secure Linear DX Code receiver controlling my garage, just in case some kids get the same idea I once had.

:)

Engine quits...

[Shadow Wrought]

As a pilot I can tell you that one of the things drilled into your head, early and often during training, is the question "if the engine quits here, where are you going to land?"

At 1500' over a heavily populated area the pilot could still be in trouble with the FAA. It is technically legal, but not necessarily safe or prudent. Simply put, there is not a whole lot of options for landing at 1500', and even less over a densely populated area.

I have seen a great many tech folks at the airport who are smoking holes waiting for a place to touch down. If you consistantly treat an aicraft as a car with the z-axis, it will eventually catch up to you.

My $0.02

You sound like my wife. ;-)

[flogger]

I was reading /.'s article about warchalking the other day and my wife asked what I was reading! This is rare as she is familiar with the slashdot masthead and has always stayed away whilst I read. Anyway, I tell her. Our resulting conversation was like this:
Wife: God, some people have way too much time.
Me: yea pretty wild huh.
Wife: Why are you grinning like that.
Me: huh? I'm not grinning.
Wife: You aren't thinking of going out to do this are you?
Me: Can't. I don't have wireless connectivity.
Wife: You've got DSL.
Me: --Edited speech about differences between dialup, dsl, wireless, 801b.11 blah blah blah.--
Wife: So you're telling me that you want to buy a laptop and walk around town with it?
Me: I didn't say that. We don't have the money anyway.
Wife: You'd do it though, wouldn't you?
Me: I dunno.
Wife: You would do it! Why the hell would you want to walk around and pry into other people computer networks.
Me: Dunno. Curiosity?
Wife: What? Curiosity. I might be curious to know why the neighbors are moaning so loud every night after letterman, but you don't see me over there with my x-10 camera laptop!

From there the discussion went downhill....

(ok moderators: Off topic, Funny, REAL LIFE)

Terminology

[Erbo]

Someone was pushing the term "warstorming" for detecting wireless networks from the air (from the "war-" prefix + "barnstorming"). That sounds a little better than "warflying."

Incidentally, the "war-" prefix either comes from "wardialing" or is an acronym for "Wireless Access Reconaissance," depending on how politically-correct you feel like being.