eXtreme Wednesday Turns to War

No real coding done at this evening’s eXtreme Wednesday. However, we did discuss all kinds of interesting things from developer related stuff, through “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and all the way to War Driving.

I had earlier this evening discovered that the Tom Tom Navigator GPS could function along with Mini Stumbler with some minor tweaking of the COM settings. Following a demo in the Filmhouse, without any GPS, it was decided to do some War Driving on the way home.

The set-up consisted of a Dell Axim, Dell Truemobile 1180 CF card, Tom Tom GPS and Mini Stumbler. Within a few seconds we had identified four access points in Lothian Road. The trip out of Edinburgh into Dunfermline then onto Freuchie revealed 32 acquired access points in total. Perhaps if we had been driving slower then this number could have been greatly increased. Perhaps if it wasn’t midnight then more access points may have been switched on.

Most alarming was the following stats:

o 3 were in their complete factory default state
o 2 were in their factory default state with the exception of having WEP enabled
o 15 had no protection enabled at all (a few of which was due to the factory default being no WEP)

This means that approximately 50% of the access points we discovered were open. Admittedly, some were service provider points such as BT OpenZone but a significant number were not! We’ll never know if these access points were open as some kind of freedom of usage or due to ignorance of the owners. Come on everyone, secure your wireless now! It isn’t difficult and will stop undesirables from abusing your connection, computers and network.

Colin Mackay was well impressed, alarmed and generally left with a longing for more knowledge on the subject.

We’ll maybe post a map in the next few days with our results. Just waiting on Map Point software arriving in the next day or so. It is then possible to use StumbVert to plot the locations onto detailed OS quality maps!