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Friday, December 20, 2002

War....walking?

No, I don't mean walk-on-Washington protests or anything like that. You might have heard of [Wardriving], or [Warchalking], two increasingly popular geek activities where you either drive around looking for open wireless access points (or not so open, if you crack the WEP security), or you use chalk to mark an access point's location. Obviously, unless you have something like an iPaq, it's impractical to walk around a city looking for access points. Walking around with an open laptop isn't easy (though you can get away with it at Defcon, where people will generally keep out of your way). The other day I popped into RadioShack and saw this behind the counter
[Wireless Camera Detector]
Now these "wireless cameras" operate in the same frequency range as 802.11b (2.4GHz). So you could walk around with this little gadget and have it beep when you were within range of an access point, then whip out your laptop to grab the SSID or whatever. You would think RadioShack might market it as such since there are probably more 802.11b APs out there than X10 wireless cameras right now.

Anyway, it would make a cool stocking stuffer. Maybe I'll pick one up in SF this week and give it shot.

12/20/2002 12:50:00 PM ] [  0 comments  ]
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