Nokia calls Wireless Warchalkers 'Thieves'

Mr]-[at writes "Nokie "has condemned as theft the placing of chalk symbols on walls and pavements at places where people can use wireless net access."" Ok I guess if you wanna be technical about it ;)

Comments

Re:UMTS instead of WiFi...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ding ding ding, we have the winner!

I'm sure we'll soon see the various mobile companies chip in with their own condemnation of warchalking. Its all a coincedence that these are the same companies that have sunk billions into UMTS and 3G licences.

death to war chalking! SECURITY!

[Vodak]

Are these peoples bandwidth thieves? Perhaps. But if companies are so angered by the idea of war chalking then maybe they need to spread the world to secure wireless connections. Company needs to secure their connections wireless or otherwise or quit there bitching. plane and simple.

Most consumers will look for days attempting to get the correct piece of hardware for the cheapest possible price. Yet these same people won't even crack open the manual about the default security settings.

So if your not going to get off your dead ass and secure your wireless connection.... suffer

Slashdot and BBC article are titled wrongly

[Mr_Silver]

Does not sound like warchalking cleanly fits the definition of theft to me.

You're right, except that both the Slashdot title and the BBC title are wrong. Quote the BBC:

Now Nokia has joined the chorus of criticism by saying that anyone who sits outside an office and uses a company's wireless network to do their own web surfing is stealing.

"This is theft, plain and simple," wrote Nokia in its advisory.

The company said that anyone using a company's bandwidth without permission is reducing the amount of a valuable resource available to the workers in that organisation.

(emphasis mine)

So actually, what Nokia is saying is that sitting outside a company and using their bandwidth is stealing and not actually the act of warchalking.

Re:Slashdot and BBC article are titled wrongly

[kasparov]

Still completely different. You are having to scan the "code" for the alarmed vehicle. You are in fact doing a brute force attack. Requesting a DHCP address is nothing of the sort. DHCP is a standard for handing out IP addresses. There is no authentication. It is designed to give out an address to ANY machine that requests it. For more information, see RFC 2131.

Again, if some type of security is added (like WEP), then proactive measures have to be taken to "break in"--much like building an RF scanning device would be the proactive measure that you would have to take to disarm the car alarm in you example.

Re:You can't steal something i fit is protected!

[OrangeSpyderMan]

If a company doesn't protect it's wireless network by restricting MAC addresses, etc ... then I believe they loose their right to complain!

While you are entitled to believe this is the case, I assure you that it is not. Unfortunately, they don't lose the right to complain. Sure the insurance company may refuse to pay up for the loss, but from a legal standpoint they have every right to complain, and will.

The only thing that is changing, at least here in Europe, it corporate resposibility for damages made to a third party using their network. They have an obligation to attempt to prevent their IT infrastructure from being used for illegal activities. If it can be proven that they did not have reasonable protection, and that lack of protection lead to their network being used to attack a third party, they can be held responsible for damages to the third party, even if the attack originated outside of their network, and only used it as a rebound. A good example would be the openssl worm last week that infects then "phones home" on 2002/udp to potentially take part in DDoS. If after this, a company didn't at least block outbound traffic on 2002/udp at the firewall (if for example the server couldn't be patched straight away) then that company can be legally responsible for the (its part in) the DDoS attack.

They do make WAN/WLAN gear

[Andy Dodd]

http://www.linux-wlan.org/index.html

Check it out. They make Prism2-based 802.11 devices.

No 11b devices listed there, but I wouldn't be surprised that if they had classic 802.11, they have 802.11b

If WAN rather than WLAN was not a typo, they make plenty of WAN equipment too. Check their site. http://www.nokia.com/

http://www.nokia.com/phones/nokiad211/d311_speci fi cations.html - Slick, huh?

A lot of cellular companies see 802.11 as augmenting 3G, not competing with it. Or more properly, 3G as augmenting 802.11. 802.11 for your 'net in the cities and 3G out in the boonies.

Re:Well of course Nokia don't like it

[10Ghz]

"Or like their *friends* at Ericsson: Combining the two [ericsson.com]?"

You mean something like this:

http://www.nokia.com/phones/nokiad211/index.html

True, it aint UMTS, but UMTS isn't available yet.

US Broadcasting/Receiving Laws?

[clf8]

I seem to recall hearing somewhere (can anyone help me out?) that in the US there is nothing illegal about receiving signals transmitted. So, technically, it's legal to listen in on analog cell phone conversations, police band, and what not. Were that data encrypted, then it is illegal to break the encryption to read it.

The UK may be different, but I'm not sure what the illegal part is. Running dhcp to receive an IP address is not hacking. If you then attempted to get into their systems, that would be hacking. So as long as activities were kept to simply using their system as an access point and nothing more, I believe you're within your legal rights (in the US) (for now).