Slashdot Mirror
Germany Finds Kismet, Custom Code In Google Car
theodp writes "While waiting for a hard disk of Wi-Fi data that Google says its Street View cars gathered by mistake, the Hamburg Information Commissioner's office performed tests on a Google Street View car in a controlled environment with simulated wireless networks and issued the following statement: 'For the Wi-Fi coverage in the Street View cars, both the free software Kismet, and a Google-specific program were used. The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.' Interestingly, a 2008 academic paper — Drive-by Localization of Roadside WiFi Networks (PDF) — describes a similar setup, and its authors discuss how they 'modified Kismet, a popular wireless packet sniffer, to optionally capture all packets received on the raw virtual interface.' Computerworld reports that lawyers in a class-action suit have amended their complaint to link a Google patent app to Street View data sniffing."
The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.
No. It makes it very difficult and tedious and impractical to analyze. It is not, however, impossible.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because you're not a multinational corporation with $20+ billion in revenue and a whole division of lawyers?
There isn't anything inherently illegal about what they did, unfortunately. Encrypt your networks folks. However, being a professional user of the Kismet application I would contend that using Kismet shows that all the data collection was far from "accidental".
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
He found a simple RESTful web API to be too complicated. You actually thought he would be able to understand binary?
And it was a Google RESTful API, as this is a Google binary... so obviously Google would have created it to be so complicated, only Google staffers could understand it!
And the mention of the paper on wireless sniffing? What the fuck does that have to do with Google? Did they sponsor it? No. Did their employees write it? No. Did their employees participate in it? No. But he mentions it just because it re-inforces the conclusion he wants you to draw.
Glenn Beck would be so proud!
So.. when do we call out this idiot as an MS shill?