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SSID As the New Community Bulletin Board and Yard Sign
Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber writes that wireless routers have become the lawn signs of the digital age, particularly in large apartment buildings, where almost every unit has a unique Wi-Fi network that will be detected in turn by all the other unique Wi-Fi networks. SSIDs can be a cheeky, geeky way to broadcast messages to your immediate neighbors. Most of us keep it simple with '275_Elm_Street,' 'Apt23,' or 'my_network,' but some get more creative with names like: 'Apt112IHaveYourMail,' 'PrettyFlyForAWiFi,' or 'WeCanHearYouHavingSex' — a great way to freak out your annoying neighbors without hiding in their bushes or peeping in their windows late at night. Now the team at OpenSignalMaps, which maintains a database of geolocated Wi-Fi access points, analyzed the data they've collected about wireless routers to see whether Wi-Fi names are 'being used to fly political colors' and have found, globally, 1,140 results for 'Obama' and an additional six for 'Romney' — an indication not necessarily of Romney's popularity relative to the president's, but of the attention that four years as president can confer. 'There's something uniquely contemporary and incredibly old-school about that kind of broadcasting: It's messaging meant only for your immediate neighbors,' writes Garber. 'The politicized network names are like lawn signs for people who don't have lawns.'"
Yes, you can blurt out telephone numbers to get out of my Internets or even an advertisement for a limited audience.
SSID fields are just a rather new entity in this arena.
Have fun with them while Wifi AP points still have meaning technologically.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
SSID As the New Community Bulletin Board and Yard Sign
How about WeLuvURob?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
quite likely has more than Obama and Mittens combined as using ssid was heavily promoted by supporters as a technique to raise name awareness.
I saw "GetYourOwnDamnWifi" the other day. Ok guy, I get the point.
If the bulk of them are IPv4, they are going to consume a lot of the residual IPv4 addresses out there. Please tell me that the bulk of these access points and routers support IPv6, so that we won't have a whole lot of needless landfill from products that could be perfectly useful as networks embrace IPv6 in greater number
Is that the same Obama that is overseeing the PIPA/SOPA/CIPA/ACTA and $2 billion Utah Spying mega project? How quaint that people would use the very medium he and other politicians (bipartisan cabal) are trying to thwart to show their support...
When I first got a laptop with wifi I loaded Kismet and took the laptop with me on some errands. My favorite: HoneyPot_comeGetSnarf.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I would like to see an analysis of the names compared to the frequency of unauthorized access attempts. What names are likely to generate indifference?
There's a road going near the building, and across the street, there's a bus stop
One of the neighbours has wlan called IsItColdAtTheBusStop?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
There's always going to be American/United States bias in the world outside CONUS, so why even include them as part of your study? The world doesn't re-elect our president, United States citizens do. In places where I live where electoral votes count the majority, it gets comfortable to feel as though you vote doesn't count anyway.
Hate to be pessimistic, but this is pretty meaningless. Out of the millions of SSIDs in the US alone, TFA writer could only confer with 400 of them for a sample and make some half ass meaningful attempt at analysis? That's hardly anything worth blogging about. This is no more useful than it would be me using my neighbor's regular smoke breaks outside as a counter for how many people like fresh air during the sunlight hours of the day. Stupid.
Make it an open network but don't connect it to anything. Some people will spend hours trying to connect.
Works better when it is in range of busy public spaces.
Also works equally as well with "Free Porn".
... but I'm not giving up "FBI Surveillance Van".
Boobies is the more visible one (2.4 Ghz b/g/n), and everyone who comes over with a smartphone or laptop finds it amusing, the ladies moreso than the guys. I have a second vlan on it for when friends bring their children over with ipods, kindles and such; it doesn't seem right to tell a 10 year old to just grab boobies!!
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
'WeCanHearYouHavingSex' — a great way to freak out your annoying neighbors without hiding in their bushes or peeping in their windows late at night.
I was looking for a better way to freak out my neighbours than hiding in their bushes or peeping in their windows late at night.
Thanks slashdot!
Hiding your SSID isn't a security feature.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
How many times do you look at your wifi SSID list? Its been at least over a year for me cause whenever I need to connect I tell the machine to go direct to mine, which is not broadcast, and automatically connect.
I think the average person is about the same, they want their shit connected, and wont ever look at it again until something messes up. So "SSID As the New Community Bulletin Board and Yard Sign" is an interesting thought, and may be happening in some few areas, but its a big leap since chances are no one will ever read them.
I know it's fooled at least one person.
I set my phone up to broadcast "IRSAuditor28401938" and took a stroll around the wealthy area of town. Almost as fun as yelling "migras!" at a construction site.
Has anyone managed to send data using this technique? I realize that the data payload would be very small, but considering how fast you can switch SSIDs I imagine this should be possible. The main advantage is that you wouldn't need to actually assign an IP address to your computer in order to receive data - which should reduce the potential for malicious access. I did a quick google search and didn't find anything under "send data using ssid". Anyone seen something like this? What is the theoretical / practical data throughput? Could multiple routers be used in parallel to increase throughput? (like in the old days of bonding ISDN channels together)
They broadcast their idiocy with such gems as "WHITEPOWER" and "KILLNIGGERS". So technology is making it easier to identify the assholes in society. For a while, I powered up a spare AP connected to nothing, and broadcast "OURNEIGHBORSAREIDIOTS".
I am surprised to see that much ruckus about this "OpenSignalMaps" when Wigle http://wigle.net/ already existed for a while, and has more than 61 million networks recorded around the world. I do know they don't have the fancy Web2.0 website, but they have been doing this before that even got popular...
"Disable Wireless" and "Police Department" are two of my favorites. "404 not found" is another fun SSID.
Unless you are *looking* for AP's, once you are setup you never will see that your neighbor is being a jerk. your machine just auto-connects to yours, and you are off and running.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Check it out in Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town .
Sure, it's only fiction. But my home wireless, which I invite you to use whenever you're within range, is called ParasiteNet.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Have gnu, will travel.
How come all screen shots are iOS or OSX? I don't think I've seen anything else...
Now I want to get a $15 Belkin and just use it as a yard sign. It wouldn't be connected to the internet at all.
Out of the millions of SSIDs in the US alone, TFA writer could only confer with 400 of them for a sample
400 is what you can find in an afternoon of war driving in suburbia, or an hour walking around apartment complexes with a wardriving app on your smartphone.
But realistically, with WIFI being such a short range medium getting a significantly larger sample with a non-google scale budget is pretty problematic. You can't detect them very far away, and the more crowded the wifi space the smaller the detection distance due to unfavorable signal to noise ratio.
To the rescue: http://wigle.net/ a collection of 57 million crowd-sourced, geocoded access points gleaned via various means, but most of them with a smart phone application like Wigle Wifi Wardriving available free for android. Simply turn that on, put on your headphones and go for a walk and when you get back you will have very accurate maps of dozens of routers. Log into Wigle.com, upload, and contribute to the map which can also be searched and zoomed. (Their server is prone to slashdotting).
They could have worked a deal with Wigle.net to mine their SSID names, sorted in order by the first 6 letters, and discarded the first 98% and come up with a far more interesting collection.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
For my home WiFi I have "Venture Labs", and for my mobile 4G hotspot I have "Central Dogma".
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Hiding your SSID isn't a security feature.
Very true.
My brother-in-law has an equally... er... effective strategy. He set his SSID to "broken" in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it. He also has WPA2 with a reasonable password, though.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
in hopes that people wouldn't see that and decide not to try to use it
Er, s/wouldn't/would/
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
My favorite SSID is "Limited Connectivity".
I'm sorry, but there aren't any prerequisites for blogging. I'm not sure where you got the expectation that things are "worth blogging about" but I've seen some pretty nonsensical drivel on blogs many times.
One of my favorite ones, is a house about 8 doors down, which has a WPA secured network and a WEP one called "FBISecureInvest" or some such. Which I find funny, because while Im 100% sure its not the FBI, I'm still not going to mess with it.
Out of the millions of SSIDs in the US alone, TFA writer could only confer with 400 of them for a sample and make some half ass meaningful attempt at analysis? That's hardly anything worth blogging about.
Actually, the study was based on a database of 75 million geolocated access points, as compiled by OpenSignalMaps. You might like to read the original study report to get a better idea of what's going on here.
The actual disappointing thing is that, out of 75 million access points, they only found about 1,200 hits for "obama" -- which doesn't seem to have any real statistical significance at all. Furthermore, there were only 6 hits for "romney" -- probably because a lot of these access points were polled over the last several years, and that name had little relevance until fairly recently.
Other than that, these people noticed access points with funny names (as many people on this thread have noted) and decided to try to do some research. Nothing to get worked up about.
Breakfast served all day!
Wigle allows you to view from the national level, impressive to see how the world is covered. Wigle is a simple and informative app. Also the google maps integration with wigle seems to be better than the opensignal page. I keep it running while driving, it's interesting to see just nodes you've discovered on the map.
I am a fan of using "NeverNeverLAN"
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The real problem with this survey is that they limited it to America.
Obama is nothing and Romney is huge in Amercia.
http://gawker.com/5914880/chinese-owner-of-amerciacom-says-romney-typo-is-helping-him-fund-his-sons-college-education
I don't think many people named their networks just Obama (or just Romney for that matter). It'd be interesting to know how many and where are named "Go Obama!" or "Reelect Obama" or something like that vs something like "Fuck Obama". Romney hasn't done enough nationally yet to get that many people to hate him or be enthusiastic about him.
I don't reply to ACs
For some years I used "PubicBroadcast" as id for the guest connection, partially to see if any neighbors would catch the typo, partially to annoy the extreme prude living across the street. The WPA2 key of course was "IReallyShouldPayForMyOwnWiFi"
I've got 2 SSID's called "Touch This And Die" and as honeypot "shenanigans unda intuentis" ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
For my conspiracy theorist neighbor, I have "deasurveillance" and "fbisurveillance."