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

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.

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.