I did my first war driving... was it four years ago? something like that. Went out with with Paul Brislen who wrote the story for Computerworld and I did one for PC World.
Now, the key thing is: at the time, the new Computer Crimes Act had not been passed. It has now however, and what you're doing may in fact be illegal.
It's been illegal in most countries for a while now. I don't think it's the actual wardriving that bothers police (I imagine bandwidth theft is really not a huge concern to NYPD, for example) rather, what you are downloading that necessitates going so far out of your way to achieve 'anonymous' internet access.
For instance, run a google search for 'wardriving arrest' and it won't be long before you see the ubiquitous 'child porn' charges. Try explaining to police that you're just real passionate about technology and were interested in conducting your own wi-fi security research.
If it was me, I'd set up a website explaining the goals of the project beforehand. I'd also bring the fiancée/friends/colleagues along and publish the results. If it really is a reputable study, intended to inform for the greater social good it may even be worth while contacting the police in advance for advice & permission.
juha: I did my first war driving... was it four years ago? something like that. Went out with with Paul Brislen who wrote the story for Computerworld and I did one for PC World.
Now, the key thing is: at the time, the new Computer Crimes Act had not been passed. It has now however, and what you're doing may in fact be illegal.
You may find , technically, by your wireless card finding a network, that you are doing something illegal, let alone "connecting" to it. Now the police won't be intetrested in such a complaint being raised, effectively you have "stolen" some bits off "the network "
lestag: You may find , technically, by your wireless card finding a network, that you are doing something illegal, let alone "connecting" to it. Now the police won't be intetrested in such a complaint being raised, effectively you have "stolen" some bits off "the network "
I was very much against the new legislation precisely for the reasons you state. It is much too wide.
But the networks are responding to a request for network "Any" - therefore they are broadcasting their existance.
If the network had the much-misnamed ssid broadcast turned off, this would not happen and they would only appear on a passive scan, which is not what stumbler or windows does.
Just because xtra ship out wireless routers that are by default configured to be wide open and also neglect to warn people about the need to secure them doesn't take the blame off the user that operates the network that effectively answers requests for a network.
I did a similar thing to see how many people had Wi-Fi and in doing so, found that a LOT don't have it secured and I could just use their internet service. I didn't used to have mine secured because I thought not many people would find it and if they did, I didn't mind if they used some internet.
I walked around our block [primarily testing how far my Wi-Fi signal reached, which wasn't very far] using my Asus notebook looking for Wi-Fi signals.
Of about 80 houses, there were about 20 Wi-Fi sources and 6 of them were open to use. That's a similar ratio to that reported in the first post:
<<I spent about 4 hours driving around and found that of the 180 access points that we found, 71 were unencrypted and allowed us access to the network. (we didnt do anything other than confirm that the dchp server gave us an ip then we moved on).
I was also rather surprised to find that around 60 of these access points were in areas that we would consider higher socioeconomic areas, or the newly developed areas with average house prices around $500,000+. Almost all of the access points we found in the lower areas were secured.>>
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