 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
searching for wireless internet networks in Portland: not as futile as one might think
orginally published in the Portland Phoenix on 08/15/03
We’re cruising the narrow cobblestone streets of the Old Port, pointing a small silver device out the window as we roll by office buildings and antique shops, until suddenly the lone, flickering red light turns to a pulsing row of green.
“We got one!”
My trusty driver swerves to the curb and I pull out the laptop. Five magic words hover in the bottom right corner of the screen: Network detected, signal strength good. Oh yeah, baby. Who ya gonna call?
This is wardriving — the search for wireless internet networks (named after the old-school hacking practice of “war dialing” to find modem connections) — and, in ostensibly lo-fi Portland, two days of sniffing the ether yields some pretty decent results.
Though WiFi (wireless fidelity) is enjoying a boom in popularity among early adopters of shiny, pretty, fast things, it’s hard to discern exactly how much the average computer user knows about wireless technology, except that “WiFi” is both fun and easy to say, even three times fast.
Which is rather fitting, because, once you understand the basic concepts involved, using WiFi is also fun and easy. And fast. (And sorta shiny.)
This is how it works: These days, until and unless the entire Internet goes wireless (which is highly unlikely, for reasons we’ll get to later), every connection to the Internet can be traced back to a wire running into a wall. For most of us, this is a cable or fiber-optic connection, though some people still use their phone lines (poor, crazy bastards). All these wires comprise a physical infrastructure that must be installed and maintained, often at prohibitive costs.
Now, to go WiFi, you take this “landline” connection, and attach to it a device that broadcasts and receives data on specific radio frequencies. This transceiver is your base station, though it has many other names (gateway, router, access point) depending on the nuances of its function.
Next you take your laptop or desktop computer, your PDA, or any other wireless-enabled device, and give it a WiFi radio. Most new laptops come with one embedded, but for older models it’s as simple as buying a PC card, which will set you back about $30. Similar, smaller cards exist for PDAs, and most desktop PCs will take an external radio that connects to the machine via a USB cable.
Thus, all of your devices with WiFi radios can talk to your base station, which in turn connects those devices to the Internet. Voila, wireless Internet access. (The base station doesn’t have to be connected to the Internet, incidentally — it can be used to network a room full of computers to just each other.)
So what use is WiFi to the average computer user? It may seem like technological masturbation to set up a wireless network in a 750-square-foot apartment, just so a laptop connected to a stereo in the living room can play the mp3s stored on the hard drive of a PC two rooms away. And, uh, it is.
But the fun begins when you get off your own network and go looking for somebody else’s. See, if I happen to be close enough to your base station, I can use it, too, even though I might actually be in your driveway.
what’s yours is mine
Like all things that seem too good to be true, it should be mentioned that gaining free Internet access via somebody else’s WiFi network is currently the subject of some debate in the tech community. Is it stealing? Or is an unsecure network fair game? Cast in a more positive light: Can wardrivers assume that a publicly accessible network was left that way on purpose, as a sort of ad-hoc community resource?
Sean Gilman, of the Portland-based Systems Engineering, sees it both ways.
“I mean, you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you — that’s theft,” he says.
On the other hand, “if you’re crazy enough to leave it wide open, people are going to use it.”
The debate is relevant primarily because each user on a network will suck precious bandwidth from the person actually paying the bills on that account, to the tune of 1 to 11 Mbps (megabits per second) per average user out of an available 250 KBps (kilobytes per second). Start transferring large files and the required bandwidth quickly escalates.
So touchy is the issue that those in the burgeoning wardriving community are adamant about the distinction between looking for networks and actually connecting to them — claiming they only engage in the former.
Officially speaking, it remains to be seen which side the law will come down on — in regards to both wardriving and piggybacking on open networks — but precedence indicates that it will be up to the owner of a wireless network to make sure that network is secure. (This assumes, of course, that WiFi mooches are merely surfing the Web, not trying to crack into the host’s system. That’s already illegal.)
The fact that the mooch-or-not debate even exists is due to another touchy WiFi subject: security. While some hotels and retail chains now offer their customers (and anybody parked outside) free WiFi access, many other “public” networks are being offered entirely by accident.
In an attempt to make wireless technology more accessible to the average consumer, manufacturers of WiFi hardware and software are releasing their products with even the most basic security feature turned off. The security system is called WEP (wireless encryption protocol), and though some security experts criticize it as weak, and crackable in under an hour by a skilled hacker, it still keeps out the riff-raff. Netstumblers who encounter a WiFi network with WEP enabled won’t be able to get online via that network unless they have the encryption key — and WEP sends a clear message, should such a distinction ever become legally relevant, that this bandwidth is not for public consumption. page 2 | page 3