This is good news: people are sharing their Internet connections. This aint stealing DSL off your roommate -- people are publishing the location of their wireless internet-connected gateway so that if you're in the area, and you have a wireless card, you can get on the net. It's sweeping the nation. Burning Man (aka Black Rock City) has had a Wireless Access Network called PlayaNet for a couple of years now. If you're curious who's running free WAP's right now check the San Francisco Bay 802.11b Wireless Internet Access Point List

Now on the hackin tip. Remember the movie Wargames? The kid stumbled on a phone number that let him dial into the national war game simulator. It was based on a really common hacking technique. You get a list of all the phone numbers you can (white pages?) and then you program your computer to dial them and see if a there's a modem on the other side. If computer answers on the other side you then try to log into it. Some are open and some aren't. It's never been too interesting to me, I suppose in this version of panning for gold you occasionally come across something interesting but...anyhow. There's a new version of this hack called War Driving. Here's an article about people War Driving in San Francisco and another one.

I don't know about driving around all wired up like a HAM radio geek but you can sniff the air in your local area if you have a wireless card. You can use NetStumbler or AirSnort to determine if someone in your apartment building is waving their big wireless ass in the air. Once you find one, chances are that they took it out of the box, plugged it in and didn't set any security. It will be wide fuckin' open and you can packet sniff the hell out of it.

If you've never packet sniffed, (and you probably haven't), basically what you do is collect every network packet that is sent out. Normally you can only packet sniff on wired ethernet networks (in other words, a LAN -- machines that are connected by ethernet cables and a hub) but these wireless networks are ethernet-based. When you have a computer connected to an ethernet network, the card in your machine only grabs the packets that are intend for it and lets the other ones fall in the bitbucket. But a packet sniffer grabs all of them. It's kind of like if you went down to the little brown mail box on the corner and grabbed a copy of everyone's mail instead of waiting for yours to be delivered. Packets have a destination address, an originating address, some info about what kind of data it is and some data. Heck, just like a letter. That data can be the password that your Outlook client uses to retrieve your email or it can be the email itself. You can tell sniffer software to just show you every time a request from any address to any address on port 110 is made (Outlook's POP authentication) and show you what was in those requests.

Well, who cares about passwords and email anyhow. I know I don't. But it is kind of funny how you get the keys to the whole damn kingdom. This is more invasive than the normal IP-level internet hacking because when you packet sniff, you use an ethernet-level connection. Normally to snoop on this level you'd have to be attached directly (meaning, a cable from your laptop into the hub in their data center) to some ISP's net.

Hey tree house kids! Want the 2002 version of two tin cans and some string? If you have someone special in mind that you want to share the air with, why not build a couple of Yagi Antennas out of old Pringles cans?