Wardriving --the practice of driving around with a portable computing device and Wi-Fi antenna, looking for open Wi-Fi networks--is not new. In fact, wardialing, or calling up random phone numbers looking for modem connections, has been going on for at least 20 years. There is, however, a new ethical debate surrounding wardriving, whether it's legal, and whether it serves a larger purpose.
While wireless home computing offers obvious benefits in terms of being able to surf the net and download emails from anywhere within a home, it comes with a potential downside - security.
Police national e-crime manager Maarten Kleintjes warns it is easy to tap into wireless networks if they are not properly secured.
More than the privacy of people's communications can be at stake. Spammers can hack into wireless networks from reasonable distances using directional antennas to deliver spam, burdening hapless computer owners with unexpected bills.
DRIVING through the central business district of Makati all the way to Malate in Manila, a German whitehat hacker discovered that only 15 of the 66 wireless access points or wireless local area networks located in these two areas were "encrypted."
"The encyrption levels of these access points were not even secure," said the German whitehat hacker known as Van Hauser.
Van Hauser was in Manila as one of the experts invited to the third annual Philippine Information Technology Security Conference.
Lewisham Council has created a model designed to help other local authorities around the UK offer e-government services over a wireless broadband infrastructure.
As part of a national project sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Lewisham and its supplier BT have provided a Wi-Fi (wireless local area network) template for other councils to follow, it announced on Friday.
Wireless technology has in recent weeks helped extend the long arm of the law at events ranging from the Republican National Convention in New York City to a rock concert in Staffordshire, England.
The wireless networks are being used in conjunction with closed-circuit television cameras, which have long been used to send video images that are usually monitored by a command control center at police stations.
The Wi-Fi Alliance got its next certification programme off to a flying start, issuing WPA2 badges to a bunch of products that comply with the 802.11i security specification.
The Alliance is readying other programmes for quality of service and the 802.11n fast Wi-Fi standard due next year.
For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.
The ambitious plan, now in the works, would involve placing hundreds, or maybe thousands of small transmitters around the city -- probably atop lampposts. Each would be capable of communicating with the wireless networking cards that now come standard with many computers.
US telecom operators are only 18 months away from offering local WiMax communications to their customers, according to research released on Monday.
The Meta Group says that falling costs and increased mobility will ensure WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) can be a viable communications option.
WiMax has the potential to reduce capital and operational expenses, improve customer satisfaction and allow service differentiation for carriers taking up the technology, according to the research.
The use of Wi-Fi / 802.11 wireless networks is steadily increasing despite many studies reporting security problems, Dr. Gianluigi Me, a Professor at the University of Tor Vergata of Rome, Italy and a staff member at the Wi-Fi Technology Forum (Wi-Fi-TF), together with Dr. Francesco Ferreri have just published "New vulnerabilities to DoS attacks in 802.11 networks", a Wi-Fi Security paper highlighting the newly discovered dangers, suggesting remedies and possible defenses.
The information police officers need while they're on patrol is usually somewhere else. Either in records back at police stations, or in a dozen databases at local, state and federal levels.
Now officers can retrieve information from "wherever" - wirelessly. A company called ARINC is helping police do just that:
