SwimFinsSF

iStumbler

i just ran across this in my morning news hopping and it makes me wonder what folks think about ‘sharing’ of wireless networks. In general my attitude toward my AirPort connection in my house is that, as long as people are respectful in their usage of my base station and don’t clog up my bandwidth to the point that I can’t use it I don’t mind sharing. However if I start seeing excessive traffic at times when i need to be using it I’ll start shutting it down.

I’m a fan of the whole ‘communal’ networking idea where people around the city help provide the infrastructure that would allow wireless access from wherever you choose to be. This would benefit me when I want to use my powerbook in a coffee shop in someone else’s neighborhood and it would benefit others when they’re in my ‘hood. New York City has started this in a public way in many of its parks already – the city is setting up access points in many parks so you can hang out in the fresh air and still get work done..

That said, I have seen a number of cars near our house lately with people sitting in them with notebook computers on their laps. I’m kind of assuming that they are ‘borrowing’ airtime from our block (which is particularly full of access points) and probably documenting this fact for others… I’m not sure if this should make me feel uncomfortable or not. I like the idea of sharing and if I wanted my airport locked down I would do it (and have before) but this kind of feels back handed to me. It does seem like many of these folks are perfectly OK with sneaking in the back door of someone’s connection without permission regardless of whether they’re wanted or not… Kind of like plugging an extension cord into an outlet on someone else’s house..

I’m kind of conflicted about this so for now I’m going to stick to sharing my airport without telling anyone how to find it and if I see the flashing light going nuts at times when I’m not using it locking it down…

1 Comment to iStumbler

Alf Watt
August 12, 2003

One of the interesting features of iStumbler is that it can be instructued to prefer network which are declared ‘public’ by way of appending .public to the ssid.

What’s frightening to me is that one of the most requested features for iStumbler is WEP cracking. I’ve refused to implement this feature for two reasons: software exists to do this already and second, I’m not interested in putting guns and knives in the hands of children.