When wireless routers first went mainstream they felt like magic. Connecting your laptop to the internet without a cable? Amazing. As time marched on, routers became more impressive, getting longer range and faster speeds. Nowadays, there are many affordable routers on the market, and many consumers are happy with them.
One of the many revelations from the Snowden files was that Canada's spy agency has been tracking people as they connect to WiFi in different public locations. And if Canada is doing it, you can be pretty sure the NSA and GCHQ are doing the same, since neither is known for being backward in using whatever means it can to snoop on huge numbers of people. Of course, you'd expect spy agencies to be up to these kinds of tricks, and you might also be unsurprised to learn that shops are also tracking you using your WiFi connection.
A mobile advertising company that tracked the locations of hundreds of millions of consumers without consent has agreed to pay $950,000 (£640,000) in civil penalties and implement a privacy program to settle charges that it violated federal law.
New rules that affect open source firmware on Wi-Fi routers will be implemented on June 2, but not all network hardware will prevent the loading of third-party software.
Linksys has been collaborating with chipmaker Marvell and the makers of OpenWrt to make sure its latest WRT routers can comply with the new rules without blocking open source firmware, company officials told Ars.
Project Fi just celebrated its first birthday, but it was conceived more three years ago, on Boxing Day 2012.
There's a certain degree of doubt about whether it's possible to hack into an airplane's avionics from the in-flight Wi-Fi, as one security researcher claimed last year. But it's possible to do all sorts of things to fellow passengers—as USA Today columnist Steven Petrow recently found out. Following an American Airlines flight, Petrow was approached by a man who claimed to have gained access to the content of his e-mails, which showed communication with sources for a story Petrow was writing.
A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed an extremely power-efficient version of Wi-Fi wireless networking technology that consumes 10,000 times less power than the current Wi-Fi components, allowing Wi-Fi networking to be built into a much wider range of devices. The team will present a paper (PDF) with the results of their research into what they have dubbed Passive Wi-Fi at the upcoming USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in March.
Li-Fi, a super-fast alternative to Wi-Fi, is finally moving from research labs to the real world after an Estonian startup implemented the technology within a commercial context. Velmenni, a recent finalist at the Slush 100 startup competition in Helsinki, revealed that it has begun trialling the technology within offices and industrial environments in Tallinn.
Infernal Twin is an automatic wifi hacking tool, basically a Python suite created to aid penetration testers during wireless assessments, it automates many of the common attacks – which can get complicated and hard to manage when executed manually.
It was 25 years ago, when the 802.11 WiFi specifications were first defined, back in 1997. Since then WiFi has helped to reshape the world we live in, making pervasive wireless data connectivity the norm and giving birth to a new era of mobility and connectivity.
Adrian Stephens, chair of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that the IEEE is a standards body where natural competitors come together.
