<OT> War driveing for dollars....

[keith morse]

Jerry McBride wrote:

> I took my laptop to work this morning, running kismet. It scanned my path all 
> the way from home to workplace... some 20 odd miles. Along the way kismet 
> detected 117 wireless installations. Imagine that... just a leasurely drive 
> to work and I pass through 117 fields of opportunity.
> 
> The really shocking thing was that less than 20% used encryption and fewer 
> than 10% used anything more than the default setup included with the wireless 
> device. Wow! 
> 
> Ten of the 117 detections were were using essid's that could be easily be 
> identified with the names or operations of a business and were legitimate 
> commercial operations. Which I contacted this afternoon, with five of them 
> making arrangements for me to survey their wireless setups. 
> 


Aye. this matches the informal surveys I've done also.  About two years ago 
a friend and I were driving from Hillsboro to Portland, roughly about 6-8 
miles.  He was using netstumber and we had placed a little 5db antenna with 
a magnetic base on the top of my cat to hookup to the Orinoco Gold card. 
Found ~ 146 if memory serves and about 30 had WEP enabled.

I do know some people who depend on this largess of the public to get 
internet access.

By the way, your posting seems to be somewhat in the future.