I'm surprised that none of the students tried to skew the results as the author expected. If could have been done fairly easily by writing a quick HTML page that uses JavaScript to make a couple iframes continuously load a variety of different sites.
A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#12I 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…
I was a student there 1986-1990, then worked full-time on Athena until February, 1998. What you say has been true a long time. There are no-trespassing signs at all MIT entrances only so that the MIT police can legally eject people who cause trouble. Casual visiting is normal.
In 1994 I pushed hard to get kerberos-authenticated telnet into the Athena release. The general sentiment from others was that, sure, sniffing passwords was possible, but distributed computing was advancing to the point where people would be able to do everything from their desks, and wouldn't need remote logins. So kerberizing other services was a higher priority.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#13I 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…
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Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#1430% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?
it does seem a little high but so many other protocols also require a dns lookup. sometimes more than one
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#15Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#16Somewhat funny quote: "Alas, pretty boring."
I thought it sums up the article pretty well. I was expecting much more based on the title.
A better title: "Amateur high-level wireless traffic analysis of 21 consenting students during a 45 minute class"
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#17I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.
Given that realisation, I'd have thought not admitting in public to having comitted a federal crime would jump higher up your priorities!
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#1830% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?
TCP probably uses larger packets so results are bit skewed imho
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#19I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.
What's the difference between taking a picture in a public place (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of visible light) and sniffing Wi-Fi signals (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of radio)? Public photons are public photons, it seems arbitrary to distinguish them based on wavelength. How can it be a crime to measure the photons passing all around us, sometimes literally through us? The originators of these photons are knowingly sending them into the public, so they should have no expectation of privacy, just as we have no expectation of privacy for the photons that reflect off us into someone's camera on the street.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#2030% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?
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