I'd be concerned for the students that managed to push mmo-champion.com (a WoW blog) to 9th place!
A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 orig…
The difference is humans can see the visual spectrum but not the radio spectrum. This means that people tend to ensure their own privacy in the visual spectrum (by wearing clothes, etc), but don't in the radio spectrum (by transferring sensitive data unencrypted). You could argue that people are being irresponsible by not paying more attention to their "radio privacy" (and you'd be right), however the lawmakers appar…
If I recall, and I'm not a lawyer, a large part of privacy law is asking whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Not many people go around sniffing the wireless, you can reasonably assume that no one is listening at a given moment. Visible light in public are being sampled all the time by many observers.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#3330% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?
30% is mDNS which is multicast presence notification -- iTunes sharing, Bonjour etc. Blame Apple.
Re: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#34I'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.
It's not even that hard:
while [ true ]; do
curl www.google.com
doneRe: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#35I'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.
It's not even that hard: while [ true ]; do curl www.google.com done
Or, my preferred approach:
while :; do curl www.google.com; doneRe: A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students
#36I'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 orig…
Tell that to the cops next time you're standing on public property photographing a bridge. Or a border crossing. Or the Pentagon. Or the cops.