A Penguin in the Orchard

Unprotected ‘Net

I’m blogging wirelessly on the Zaurus from an unprotected hotspot in downtown Iowa City. Kismet and Kismet-Qt have worked flawlessly on this little expedition. I’m very surprised at how many unprotected networks I found and was able to access on the way here.

I kept the Z on the front seat of the car with Kismet running. Along Muscatine street, I found three open networks, of which I was able to connect to two. I just adjusted the wireless settings on the Z based on the information returned from Kismet and opened my Opera browser right to my Yahoo! Mobile home page.

Along Summit Street (an old and relatively upscale neighborhood in Iowa City), I found three more open networks. The Z would chirp and I’d find a place to pull over. I was only able to connect to one of those networks.

As soon as I stepped out of the car in the parking ramp downtown, Kismet started warbling like a song bird. There were four networks overlapping my parking space. Three of those were ‘for pay,’ and may have been from the same location. I skipped past them to the fourth, on which I’m posting this entry.

This is a real lesson in how expectation exceeds expertise in the tech world. Of the seven open networks, three were named linksys, one was named Wireless, and one was named default. None were utilizing WEP. In fact, only one (default) had bothered to actually set up 802.11 ad hoc. It was running on channel 11. The others were loose in the ether just waiting for my penguin PDA to come along.

My battery is running low … more later.

[Later] … I’m back from the war walk with a renewed vigor for WiFi and the Zaurus. While I’d love to believe that all those unprotected networks were set up as an altruistic tool for the neighborhoods, I’ve been around users long enough to know better. I’m still rather amazed at the fact that virtually no thought was given to security in the majority of the networks I found. It’s a good thing I was just having fun.