While testing out my wireless access (Intel Centrino under Linux. Yea! You might not understand, but trust me that it is a good thing) I decided to see how far it reached. So, being a geek, I took my laptop for a walk around the neighborhood. I managed to keep a good signal for a little over a block. It was still going strong, but I felt that was far enough. (Note, this was all outside, I didn’t check the signal inside some stranger’s house). So I started looking at other networks.
Within one block of my house going west and one block of my house going south, I found four other networks that were broadcasting. Yup, internet access for free. Just be nearby, connect to their network and surf the web.
All these free access points made me wonder why I am paying for internet service. Now, I’m not complaining about the access points. Mine is open, too. The router is secured, but the pipe is open.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I pay because a) I can afford to and b) somehow it would be wrong to leech access from unsuspecting people. I made a conscious choice to share my bandwidth. They didn’t. At least I think they didn’t. Because the user/passwords on their routers were set to defaults.
Anyway:
I now have wireless under Linux with an Intel Centrino chip.
I know why it is war driving not war walking with an open laptop looking like a complete and suspicious geek.
If things get tight, the neighbors can subsidize the internet costs.
Manufacturers of wireless devices for home users really need to make it clear that the defaults are dangerously insecure.
Mandrake 9.1. Using the ndiswrapper for the wireless device. Not all options are supported (iwspy doesn’t work and the reported statistics are a little wonky), but it works very well. Easy to install, too. I was afraid it would be like the time I tried to get the Nvidia drivers going.
For a while I was triple booting Windows XP, Mandrake and Java Desktop System. Windows was only there because I wanted to use the wireless device and watch DVDs. Now I have ndiswrapper and Ogle for DVDs, Windows is out of my life (except for my wife’s computer).
I ran JDS because I felt like I should fly the company flag, but I don’t like SuSE (on which JDS is based). So I just made my GNOME session on Mandrake look like JDS and called it even.
Love my Mandrake. But Slackware is close. If Mandrake ever disappoints, Slackware is getting called up.
Maybe it’s a good thing I can’t use iwspy or put wlan0 in promiscuous mode. Probably not polite to snoop other people’s network traffic.
There have been several articles on Slashdot recently about various organizations and a few governments setting up free WiFi hotspots or larger.
Cringely has had a few recent articles about suggesting business models for cheap WiFi ISPs, etc.
So the availability of cheap/free WiFi is becoming a reality (for the short term). This is in fact destroying some $ startups in WiFi ISPs. One went belly up a couple weeks ago.
The Big Bad Danger of having an open WiFi router is that someone will do Something Bad. E.g., up/download Evil Things, do spamming, etc. Once the jerks start doing this in high enough percentage, closing up routers will be necessary no matter how generous you fell. (Of course we still have that whole WEP non-security system, so everybody will have to hardware upgrade to do it.)
Plus, if someone is doing BitTorrent on your connection, your bandwidth is shot.
And yet there are companies that offer $20 a month WiFi at baseball stadiums. Who in their right mind is going to pay that? How many home games in a month anyway. Sheesh.