Slashdot Mirror


Warflying 2013 Access Points in Los Angeles

Kallahar writes "We went warflying over Los Angeles and Orange counties yesterday. Flying in a small plane at 1400 feet we detected 2013 802.11b APs in 75 minutes, 71% had no WEP encryption. A map and some pretty pictures are up at my writeup."

4 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. Mirror by markclong · · Score: 5, Informative
  2. Better yet, a mirror :) by tugrul · · Score: 5, Informative
  3. Re:Semi-offtopic: Signal range by Grant29 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can boost the signal strength of the Linksys WRT54G with this "undocumented feature". Basically it's a back door will let you up the transmission strength to the maximum output. Find details at this thread: WRT54G Increased transmission strength. People's comments there indicate pretty good results.

    Check out great deal on electronics and computer at Retail Retreat. Do your Christmas shopping online!

  4. Here's the scoop on this: by The_Pey · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. He was flying in a plane over LA. -For simplicity's sake when flying under Class B Airspace, many pilots on VFR flights tend to stick to flying over interstates - its easy and keeps you out of trouble.

    2. He had a laptop with only one 802.11 card and only one antenna for reception. The necessarily rules out any radio direction finding for accurate plotting of the access points. Instead what you see is what he picked up as he flew and the exact lat / long the plane was at at the time of the signal hit. If he could do some RDF by maybe having antennas in an array attached to the plane at say the wingtips he could with the right software plot out where each possible transmitter was. But he would need to know what altitude the plane was at, what the heading was and the different signal strengths received at each antenna as well as the distance between the antennas in his array. I don't know of any software out there that does this but the information to do this is readily available.

    If he had that setup you would see a map with the projected location of each access point arrayed around the path of the aircraft.

    --
    Hmmm...