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Modern Wardriving (2023)

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Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#51

Post by foobarian »

breck wrote: post #10

In 1895 a young Italian studying Maxwell's equations wondered if perhaps you didn't need wires to send an electromagnetic message, and after months of tinkering beamed the first radio message which rang a bell on the other side of his parent's attic. The first person he showed this to was his mother, who to her credit didn't accuse him of witchcraft but gave him a hug and supported him in all his future ventures. He…

This hits home as we just came from Marconi beach on Cape Cod where one of the antennas was. There is no antenna left, just a plaque marking the spot. In a way it's a little sad how behind this area is at this point compared to the energy of the times.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#52

Post by devilbunny »

breck wrote: post #10

In 1895 a young Italian studying Maxwell's equations wondered if perhaps you didn't need wires to send an electromagnetic message, and after months of tinkering beamed the first radio message which rang a bell on the other side of his parent's attic. The first person he showed this to was his mother, who to her credit didn't accuse him of witchcraft but gave him a hug and supported him in all his future ventures. He…

I just thought of this, so separate reply. Didn’t CSIRO enforce their WiFi patents pretty thoroughly?

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#53

Post by patrick451 »

cess11 wrote: post #35
patrick451 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reasons I don't invite the entire neighborhood into my kitchen for dinner every night. If people want wifi, they can buy it themselves.

They might be dissidents that don't want their internet traffic associated with their physical identity, which makes it quite hard to "buy it themselves" in places where cash isn't used or ID cards are commonly registered.

In which case I don't want their activity associated with my ip.

Dissidenting safely is their problem, not mine.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#54

Post by hollerith »

patrick451 wrote: post #53
cess11 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be dissidents that don't want their internet traffic associated with their physical identity, which makes it quite hard to "buy it themselves" in places where cash isn't used or ID cards are commonly registered.

In which case I don't want their activity associated with my ip. Dissidenting safely is their problem, not mine.

I agree. If my government ever turns evil, then I'll open my wireless access point.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#55

Post by eskibars »

RedAuburn wrote: post #17

Instead of using all this fancy hardware just to contribute to a proprietary database, i'd recommend uploading to BeaconDB[1] using NeoStumbler[2] on your phone. [1] https://beacondb.net/ [2] https://github.com/mjaakko/NeoStumbler

I don't really understand from reading over this: how is this not just another proprietary database?

There's no data dump: I understand why, but it means everything is behind a pretty proprietary offering. And one which "only" appears to provide geolocation, which is fine if that's what you're interested in bit which is pretty orthogonal to the article's apparent goals where the author is interested in wireless security specifically

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#57

Post by strken »

SpaceLawnmower wrote: post #49
metrix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not to get into a network, it's just to list where they're at.. For points. Similar to internet points :). There's no hacking involved just nerds being nerds What you find shows up here: https://wigle.net/ As you can see there's quite a few people who do it

The "What has this project been used for?" section in the wigle FAQ is not very compelling tbh. Now that most routers ship WPA-2 secured by default and you can find free wifi everywhere, I think the most valid use that remains is finding malicious networks. But it seems to me that by and large this is nerds doing free work for the people who use their data commercially which seems kind of anti-hacker.

I'm surprised nobody's using it for geolocation. AFAIK Google already does that, so a free competitor would be a compelling justification.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#58

Post by forgetfreeman »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #47
breck wrote: post #10

In 1895 a young Italian studying Maxwell's equations wondered if perhaps you didn't need wires to send an electromagnetic message, and after months of tinkering beamed the first radio message which rang a bell on the other side of his parent's attic. The first person he showed this to was his mother, who to her credit didn't accuse him of witchcraft but gave him a hug and supported him in all his future ventures. He…

Free WIFI tragically will fall into the 'tragedy of the commons'. How much a better place the world would be if we could freely share ANYTHING without getting abused, sabotaged, taken advantage of, taken for granted, getting hate for revoking, whatever we offer?

Or living in fear of a multitude of hypothetical behaviors that objectively most folks just don't engage in. I kept an open network for folks waiting for the bus near my house for close to 10 years. No sabotage, no abuse, no hassles of any kind.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#59

Post by ljf »

sandworm101 wrote: post #24
EvanAnderson wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a magnetic mount antenna on my car and a marine GPS that I used with Netstumbler sometime around 2001. I used an Orinoco PC Card adapter, too. I remember the external antenna connection was very fiddly and fragile. I would run the rig anytime I had a long trip to take. It was fun to see the relatively huge number of networks around bigger cities, as compared to the sparseness of rural Ohio where I lived. I stil…

I had a similar setup that i used while driving cross country ~2002. I used to pull into trucker rest areas to borrow wifi. I had more than a couple ask me about the magnetic antenna.

Trucker rest stops had WiFi in 2002?

That is awesome, I doubt we got similar services in the UK until 2015 or later.

Re: Modern Wardriving (2023)

#60

Post by user070223 »

You can somewhat do it in Android, In the past by installing apps which worked as plugin for MicroG UnifiedNLP location provider. Now it's baked into MicroG GMSCore And you can configure external loaction service provider (or rely on GPS) like Apple, Google, Mozilla(before it was retired), BeaconDB etc.
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