Posted on 01/07/2008 10:46:22 AM PST by SubGeniusX
Network security firm Sophos recently published a study on what it terms WiFi "piggybacking," or logging on to someone's open 802.11b/g/n network without their knowledge or permission. According to the company's study, which was carried out on behalf of The Times, 54 percent of the respondents have gone WiFi freeloading, or as Sophos put it, "admitted breaking the law [in the UK]."
Amazingly, accessing an unsecured, wide-open WiFi network without permission is illegal in some places, and not just in the UK. An Illinois man was arrested and fined $250 in 2006 for using an open network without permission, while a Michigan man who parked his car in front of a café and snarfed its free WiFi was charged this past May with "Fraudulent access to computers, computer systems, and computer networks." On top of that, it's common to read stories about WiFi "stealing" in the mainstream media.
It's time to put an end to this silliness. Using an open WiFi network is no more "stealing" than is listening to the radio or watching TV using the old rabbit ears. If the WiFi waves come to you and can be accessed without hacking, there should be no question that such access is legal and morally OK. If your neighbor runs his sprinkler and accidentally waters your yard, do you owe him money? Have you done something wrong? Have you ripped off the water company? Of course not. So why is it that when it comes to WiFi, people start talking about theft?
The issue is going to come to a head soon because more and more consumer electronics devices are WiFi-enabled, and many of them, including Apple's iPhone and most Skype phones we've used, come ready out of the box to auto-connect to open WiFi networks. Furthermore, as laptop sales continue to grow even beyond desktops, the use of open WiFi is only going to grow along with it.
Steal this WiFi connection!
When you steal something, there's typically a victim. With WiFi, Sophos thinks the ISPs are the victims. "Stealing WiFi Internet access may feel like a victimless crime, but it deprives ISPs of revenue," according to Sophos' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley. Furthermore, "if you've hopped onto your next door neighbors' wireless broadband connection to illegally download movies and music from the 'Net, chances are that you are also slowing down their Internet access and impacting on their download limit." In Sophos' view, then, both ISPs and everyday subscribers can be victims.
In one fell swoop, "stealing WiFi" gets mentioned in the same breath as "illegally" downloading movies and music. The fact is, people join open WiFis for all manner of reasons: to check e-mail, surf the web, look up directions to some place, etc. Those don't sound like nefarious activities, however, and certainly not activities which are likely to get someone in trouble. Of course if you run an open WAP (wireless access point) and it is heavily used for just e-mail, you could still hit your bandwidth cap (if you even have one), but that has to happen only once for that user to figure out what's up, and fix the problem. And let's be honest: it is their problem. No one forced that user to install a WAP or to leave it wide open. We'll get back to this in a minute.
The argument that using open WiFi networks deprives ISPs of significant revenue is also a red herring. Take the case of public WiFi hotspots: official hotspots aren't that difficult to find in major cities—every public library in Chicago has open WiFi, for instance. Are the public libraries and the countless other free hotspot providers helping defraud ISPs? No, they're not. There's no law that using the Internet requires payment of a fee to an ISP, and the myriad public hotspots prove this.
Really, there's only one time when you could argue that an ISP is being gypped, and that's when someone is repeatedly using his neighbor's open WiFi in lieu of paying for his own service. Is this really wrong? Let's consider some parallel examples. If the man in question were given a key and told that he could enter his neighbor's house whenever he wanted to use a PC to access the Internet, would this be wrong? Of course not. They key here (pun intended) is the "permission" given by the owner of the home. Our leeching friend would clearly be in the wrong if he were breaking into the house, of course, because he would be sidestepping something clearly set up to keep him out. If he has permission, I suppose one could argue that it's still not right, but you won't find a court that will punish such a person, nor will you find too many people thrilled at the idea that someone else can tell them who they can and can't allow into their homes for what purposes.
Some people leave their wireless access points wide open deliberately. A friend of mine and recent seminary graduate lived in a campus-owned apartment building. In addition to being a man of the cloth, Peter is a longtime Linux user and open-source advocate. While living here in Chicago, he got his DSL from Speakeasy and shared the connection with others in his building... and anyone else who needed a quick Internet fix (Speakeasy even encouraged this). He even positioned his router so that anyone in the church across the street could pick up a signal. Obviously, not everyone is like Peter. But despite easy-to-read instructions and a plethora of warnings about the need to secure your WAP, some people just can't be bothered to enable the most basic security settings.
To the person with a laptop and a sudden need to check e-mail or surf the web, it's not possible to tell who is leaving their access points open deliberately and who just plain doesn't care. The access point is there and the virtual doors are unlocked, so why not take advantage of it if you're in need?
A couple of caveats: be familiar with the law of the land. As the examples at the beginning of this story show, it's illegal to access a WAP without permission—even if it's wide open—in some places. Also, you should never use an open point for anything illegal or even unneighborly. Don't log onto the first "linksys" WAP you see and fire up a torrent for your favorite, just-released Linux distro.
And as always, don't leave your own 802.11b/g/n router wide open unless you're comfortable with random surfers using your 'Net access for their own purposes.
Open WiFi is clearly here to stay.
Say I'm in an apartment building with separate mailing addresses, I get WiFi and grant my neighbors access to the system if they help me recoup my ISP bill. My neighbors pay me enough that I don't have to pay the bill myself. Then I add another neighbor, and end up pocketing $10/month. Isn't this profit a violation of many Terms of Service?
This is no different then watching broadcast TV. If I can get an open free signal I should be able to use it.
Well, I did what you said. 58 through 60 are static. But channel 57 is interesting
It’s a very poor quality picture, but it’s an old black and white movie in spanish. No subtitles. What is that all about? Somebody is running old videos in their basement and piping it into their trasceiver? What for? Why would they do this?
It's possible that's what they are doing. A few years back you could buy a device called a "Rabbit" that allowed you to retransmit video from one room to another. They called it a "VCR multiplier" and expected you to use it to send output from your VCR to multiple TVs in the house. Perhaps someone modified one for use in the amateur band and it ended up in the hands of someone who is now using it to transmit movies. I don't think Part 97 allows for a licensed amateur to transmit copyrighted movies there.
Something’s screwy.
I was just about to fall asleep and my memory starts going off into my childhood like it sometimes does in that minute or so before becoming sound asleep. I remember now that the old TV we had with the two manual dials had one dial for VHF and one dial for UHF. I’m sure the UHF dial went almost up to 100 channels...say channel 90 or something like that.
Now, on my modern TV with the remote control that displays the channel on the picture tube says channel 57, surely I’m getting the same channel that I would have gotten on that old TV from my childhood if I turned the UHF dial to channel 57. THere was no such thing as Cable TV back then. So why do I need a “cable ready” TV to get channel 57 through channel 60 as you claim in your post?
Now, on my modern TV with the remote control that displays the channel on the picture tube says channel 57, surely I’m getting the same channel that I would have gotten on that old TV from my childhood if I turned the UHF dial to channel 57. THere was no such thing as Cable TV back then. So why do I need a “cable ready” TV to get channel 57 through channel 60 as you claim in your post?
The broadcast channels and the cable channels, although they appear to be the same channel numbering system, are actually on different frequencies. That's why you have to specify whether you are setting your channels up for broadcast or for cable when you set up your TV. The broadcast channels are divided into two -- VHF and UHF. The VHF channels are ch 2 through ch 13 and the UHF are ch 14 through ch 61 (the higher ones you may remember from when you were younger were taken away from TV broadcasters to use that radio space for cell phones). VHF channels go from 54 MHz (ch 2) to 88 MHz (ch 6) and then skip the FM band at 88-108 MHz and aircraft frequencies from 108-137 MHz and other stuff then start again at 216 MHz (ch 13) then there's a really big gap and UHF picks up at 460 MHz (ch 14) and goes step by step to 890 MHz (ch 61). That was to accommodate all kinds of stuff that use the 216 MHz to 460 MHz range from more aircraft to police radios to who knows what. Since cable services are confined to the cable they won't interfere with those services. So the cable companies instead of skipping both those little and big gaps, go ahead and use those frequencies. They keep channels 2-13 on the same frequencies as broadcast TV, but shoehorn in ch 14 to ch 22 in the little VHF gap (cable ch 14 is now on 120 MHz and cable ch 22 is on 168 MHz). And then they pick up the frequencies right after broadcast ch 13 and keep on going on the frequencies the broadcast can't use. Cable ch 23 starts at 216 MHz and goes up step by step as high as the system can handle (typically 61 channels ending at 450 MHz).
So your broadcast TV (or a cable ready TV set up for broadcast channels) will look for channel 57 at 728 MHz. A cable ready TV set to cable channel 57 will look for it at 420 MHz. So that's why you can't tune in those amateur TV stations using a non-cable ready TV. It simply won't receive those frequencies from 420 to 450 MHz.
Wow, that was long. Here's a handy chart. Hope that helps.
Correction: “VHF channels go from 54 MHz (ch 2) to 88 MHz (ch 6) and then skip the FM band at 88-108 MHz and aircraft frequencies from 108-137 MHz and other stuff then start again at 216 MHz (ch 13)”
That should read: “VHF channels go from 54 MHz (ch 2) to 88 MHz (ch 6) and then skip the FM band at 88-108 MHz and aircraft frequencies from 108-137 MHz and other stuff then start again at 174 MHz (ch 7) and go up to 216 MHz (ch 13).”
Somehow that part in the middle got deleted out when I was editing. Cheers!
If you listen to their calls or monitor their internet traffic, you’re stealing information from them - but it could be deemed similar to eaves dropping.
As long as you don’t slow the owner down, you aren’t harming him or the ISP by using the wi-fi signal.
That's a funny one. $:-)
Verizon routers allow that upon setup. I'm not a security expert, so I don't know how effective this is (or not).
Not exactly. There's a difference between 'invitation' and 'tacit permission.' I believe leaving a network unsecured (which some do) falls into the latter category.
That's almost always the case when you are on the internet behind a 'gateway' device like a cable or DSL transceiver(some people call them modems). Your internal network is always hidden from the internet, you can have ports opened up, sending certain kinds of transmissions to internal machines, or a terribly configured endpoint device that allows anything to go anywhere. Still, even in those cases your internal network still isn't visible to others on the internet. Your public(WAN)IP is all anyone will see.
It is simply the tacit granting of a public easement onto the cyber-highway. We must assume that everyone who does not secure their network is simply being neighborly.
PS: When you are on a LAN, which is what all the computers connected to an access point are apart of, all of the hosts can communicate with one another, unless you use VLANs(most residential access points don’t have this capability) with access control lists to lock down the traffic. Individual hosts on a LAN can also have firewalls to deny communications with others on the same LAN if other hosts may not be trustworthy. I would strongly recommend using a personal firewall to anyone who will be connecting to an open wireless access point.
I just wondered how secure that masking is.
It seems to me that a microwave oven is a faraday cage. If I cant find an old one big enough to cram the TV and the box into, I would think I could take apart an old one and figure out how to incorporate parts of several old ones into one faraday cage.
When you build your Faraday cage, remember it needs to cover all the way around. It should also be grounded at a single point. The tricky part is being able to move power into the cage to run stuff without providing a leakage path. Feed-through capacitors and series inductors will play a part in doing that right. The door will typically need something called "finger stock" to provide a slightly spring-loaded conducting path all the way around. The largest Faraday cage I've ever worked inside was designed to keep the EMP from a nuke weapon from destroying the computers inside. It is tested weekly.
So how does a microwave get power into the cage?
The microwave uses a magnetron to create the microwave energy. It is essentially a tuned cavity resonant at 2.45 GHz. The "antenna" probe of the magnetron is mounted inside the cooking cavity. The driving electronics are outside.
The full description is here
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