Wireless Wandering
Aug. 2nd, 2003 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterMmm. A good mug of chai, a good session of chat...this is what makes it all worthwhile.
I managed to get KisMAC, a wardriving program for the Mac, up and running on Agito, my new laptop. It was quite a struggle, since the first time I ran it, it caused a crash on boot. But the programmer of KisMAC told me what was going on and how to fix it.
It was such an issue because, unlike normal Airport drivers, the OS X drivers for the wireless card I'm using don't allow discovery of public networks in the area. So without a wardriver—a program that is capable of dubiously legal uses as well as the benign—I wouldn't be able to find out the name of a public wireless network in order to sign onto it. At any rate, I got it working now.
So, now I'm out in the Mudhouse, a downtown coffeehouse that offers wireless access, banging away on the computer away from home for the first time. Just for fun, I ran the wardriver all the way over here, and it was remarkable to see just how many hotspots there are out there...people who didn't even bother changing the name of their routers from "linksys" or "3com" let alone enabling encryption. It's like that Doonesbury cartoon...there's so much free 'net out there that someone who was suitably inclined wouldn't have to pay for it, just pull up in the car near an open hotspot.
It's also interesting to see which businesses do intentionally offer Internet access to those who want it. I'm not at all surprised to see that the Well-Fed Head bookstore is one of those, for instance.
I think I might spend a couple hours just cruising, seeing if there are any other networks that surprise me. This is fun.
I managed to get KisMAC, a wardriving program for the Mac, up and running on Agito, my new laptop. It was quite a struggle, since the first time I ran it, it caused a crash on boot. But the programmer of KisMAC told me what was going on and how to fix it.
It was such an issue because, unlike normal Airport drivers, the OS X drivers for the wireless card I'm using don't allow discovery of public networks in the area. So without a wardriver—a program that is capable of dubiously legal uses as well as the benign—I wouldn't be able to find out the name of a public wireless network in order to sign onto it. At any rate, I got it working now.
So, now I'm out in the Mudhouse, a downtown coffeehouse that offers wireless access, banging away on the computer away from home for the first time. Just for fun, I ran the wardriver all the way over here, and it was remarkable to see just how many hotspots there are out there...people who didn't even bother changing the name of their routers from "linksys" or "3com" let alone enabling encryption. It's like that Doonesbury cartoon...there's so much free 'net out there that someone who was suitably inclined wouldn't have to pay for it, just pull up in the car near an open hotspot.
It's also interesting to see which businesses do intentionally offer Internet access to those who want it. I'm not at all surprised to see that the Well-Fed Head bookstore is one of those, for instance.
I think I might spend a couple hours just cruising, seeing if there are any other networks that surprise me. This is fun.
