If you’re a “digerati” you’ve no doubt heard of this new sport, which involves driving along looking for “open” 802.11/Airport wireless internet connections.
If not, here’s the story:
Back in ancient history (1983) when the movie Wargames came out geeks had just invented programs that dialed phone numbers in sequence looking for a modem answer (“Doesn’t that cost a fortune?” “Well, there’s ways around that, too.”). Then they’d try to “break in” to computer networks, as shown in the movie, by trying to guess passwords. After the movie, sequential-dialer programs came to be known as “wardialers” – this was real 37334 haxxor warez (“Elite Hacker Software”).
Fast-foward about 20 years. For a couple hundred bucks you can set up your own home or business wireless internet connection, so you can sit anywhere in the building and not have to plug your laptop in to a wire, to get an internet connection. And some places are even setting up public networks, for example, at Starbucks.
Now, when you plug these things in right out of the box, they don’t have security set up (probably saves on dumb tech support calls). So anyone with a laptop can walk up and start sharing your internet connection. Fine for Starbucks, that’s what it’s for. But for homes and businesses this basically amounts to “sharing” your internet connection. Which is probably fine; another user isn’t going to put that big a hit on your T1, you probably wouldn’t even notice.
Now, an external user (like me) most often wouldn’t use the connection to “break in” to the owner’s computers – instead they’d just surf the web for free from their car sitting in the parking lot of some industrial park. All of your computers that are connected broadband to the ‘net have good firewalls, don’t they? Whaddya mean what’s a firewall? In any case, looking for radiowaves is (marginally) legal; and using someone’s network if they don’t secure it is (relatively) harmless.(On the other hand, driving in the car while using the PC is illegal, so when you hear the signal detector find a network, pull over…)
So. I took off from work last night, and drove home (freeway to Escondido), then to my sister’s house (Vista) – about 20 miles total. Decided for fun to leave MacStumbler running. On the way it found something like 20 wireless networks. I didn’t stop to ping each and every one of them. But this morning I did pull over,
If you have a Wintel PC, you can try Netstumbler.
Now, excuse me, I’ve got to go find some chalk.