A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
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A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
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Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#2I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult.
Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#3I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult. Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
There is little point in trying to encrypt what is effectively public wifi.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#4I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult. Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
As far as I know, yes, it is by design.
MIT's philosophy toward just about everything is famously open.
- You can walk around in just about all of the buildings during the day, and many even at night without a special access card.
- A CS professor here was the one who founded OpenCourseWare, which helped ignite the fire that led to many universities putting their courseware up for free online)
- Course registration is amazingly relaxed, to the point where halfway through the semester it is common to hear a professor say "by the way, if you haven't signed up for this course, you probably need to as the deadline is approaching"
- MIT's network is not behind a NAT box.
In terms of internet access, this culture means that anyone within radio-range of MIT's campus gets free, unprotected WiFi. A very different reception than you get at that other school down the street cough. :)
(Of course, the flip side of this is that you are responsible for your own security).
EDIT: I also remember during grad student orientation, the campus police representative explicitly told the auditorium full of new students: "The Cambridge homeless community is part of the MIT community, too. Just because you don't have a home doesn't mean you are not welcome here, so if you see someone who appears homeless on MIT campus, treat them with the respect they deserve." Approximate quote, since this was 2 years ago, but I was pretty blown away at the culture here from day 1.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#5I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#6I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult. Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
As far as I know, yes, it is by design. MIT's philosophy toward just about everything is famously open. - You can walk around in just about all of the buildings during the day, and many even at night without a special access card. - A CS professor here was the one who founded OpenCourseWare, which helped ignite the fire that led to many universities putting their courseware up for free online) - Course registration i…
Last year while at the library there was a room to a lab (where the printers were). To get in you could either punch in the code or next to it was a whiteboard with 5 or so problems each of which gave you one digit in the code.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#7I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult. Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
There is little point in trying to encrypt what is effectively public wifi.
RADIUS WPA2 with a student ID or something and a separate "public" wifi?
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#8Somewhat funny quote: "Alas, pretty boring."
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#9I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult. Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?
I guess one reason would be they have the idea that if you are worried about your activity being tracked that you probably shouldn't be doing it over the public on campus wireless.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#1030% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?