Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Okay I'm about to put on my fish hat as this is something I feel very passionately about.

Discussions like this are "a good thing" but this one is long overdue. I would much rather have people debating a system of gentle deregulation than the brute heavy-handed "we have more money than you" approach that has happened so far when corporate requirements meet established WiFi micro networks. Take for, example, Starbucks coffee, a place where I routinely steal their mugs simple to cock a snoot at business practices I object to... in San Francisco where they routinely open up stores one store found all the 802.11 wireless airspace taken. Large amounts of concatenation and networks overlapping others (homes and small businesses usually) they came in with lawyers blazing, threatened the perfectly legally established 802.11 network owners with legal action *and* imposed a gagging order unless they give them the airways rights.

You would think that what is it? 6,7 or even 9 channels of MuXed 802.11 would be acceptable wouldn't it? (Even more with 802.11g) but no, they want it all... from admin rights to login keys.

A few tech anarchists I know have managed to effectively render two Starbucks WiFi networks inoperable (it takes parts from a microwave cooker and a parabolic reflector) to knock out the base stations. Several burned out stations later they got the message and allowed the campus to share bandwidth with them.

Yet again big business using its muscle.
Yet again small guys are ahead of the game.

One of the reasons why I wanted the iBook with Airport is because it's pretty much an open airways policy out there anyway because of limited knowledge -- tech departments don't even properly encrypt the access keys and there is always a back door. I could speak for a day on strategies for making 802.11 robust to corporates, except I wouldn't even want to give them the time of day...

With tools like WiSnooper and NetStumbler, I can pretty much walk into a city, find an uniuntentional public-access honeypot and pick up my mail, browse the web... Its entirely possible for me to log into poorly secured machines and, say, download dubious images and move it onto someone's machine... I'm not even a cracker, this is just down to sysadmins not getting up to speed with the security. They've concentrated on the wired lines of attack.

For fun have a look at Brent Sleeper's Blog which shows you how to make a perfectly good parabolic reflector with a pringles tube (of all things), although a dustbin and a dinner plate are just as good.

There are a few good white papers on covertly accessing 802.11 networks and what's needed to tie things down from a sysadmin's POV here and "misbehaving with 802.11. A good overall article about 802.11 analysis tools can be found here.

I'd love to be at that discussion.

BTW we operate a totally open 802.11 WiFi where I live... drive up, log in and move on... although the dogs wil alert us of any physical visitors ;) We use Channel 6 (leaky microwave affects Channel 1,4 and I like the number 6). The porn is located on home.local:Magda/Documents/Porn/ (mostly pictures of other people's HiFi systems and a few tastily modified iMacs)...