Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia War Driving

When something works so well for business it is only natural to assume that it can apply to vacations too. After all, if you take your laptop and stay in touch with the office, you aren’t really running away on vacation. You’re merely changing the initiation point of your office e-mails. Of course, this presumes that the Internet exists where you are going.

Last month I spent a week vacationing near Manchester, Vermont. To make a long story short, I knew I was in trouble when the innkeeper said, "Wideband what?" when I asked about connecting to the Internet. It was either make a long-distance telephone call to New York for the nearest IP, or hunt for one of the few local businesses with a cable modem connection. None of these included the hotels. Evidently the leaf peepers who overwhelm Vermont every year prefer low-tech entertainment like beer and brat. According to the innkeeper, the first communication priority, if any, would be to add some cell phone service. Welcome to a black hole.

The search wasn’t going to be easy and it called for desperate measures. From everything I could tell, the only pastimes in Manchester are either shopping in one of the local factory outlets or hanging out at one of the many restaurants and cafes while waiting for the next factory outlet to open. If there is a hip cafe with Internet service, no one seemed to know where it is. I decided the only way to find an Internet connection in this town was to take PC in hand and go war driving.

War driving is when you go driving through a neighborhood with a wireless-enabled notebook computer and map houses and businesses that have wireless access points. War driving comes from a play on the older term "war dialing." Film buffs should recognize war dialing from the 1983 movie War Games with Matthew Broderick, in which his character uses an IMSAI computer to automatically call telephone numbers looking for any modem-connected games and bulletin-board systems. He inadvertently ends up with a direct connection to a high-level military computer that gives him control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Obviously, everything hits the fan after that.

If there was a coffee house with Wi-Fi, I could simply tell by turning on my laptop and driving down the street. So, with my trusty Sony TR3A (3 lbs, 10.6² screen) on the dashboard, I drove through Manchester’s two main streets and looked for traces of 802.11b. To my amazement, I picked up seven different signals in 2 miles. None were encrypted!

I got a signal outside one cafe in the center of town. As I walked in with my computer, the screen popped up with a little notice saying that Internet service was $6.95 per day and I should sign up now. I noted the location as a backup in case I couldn’t find free service someplace else. About 10¢ out the cafe door, I picked up a much stronger Wi-Fi signal with a random-looking alphanumeric ID. There wasn’t any commercial business that looked like it could be the source. Curious, I clicked on Internet Explorer and instantly my home page appeared. I had no idea whose Wi-Fi it was, but what the heck, it worked. I got back in my car and downloaded my e-mail.

After my quick unofficial access, I decided to see whether or not the other five signals I had picked up could be accessed as easily. It turned out that three allowed me to connect with no trouble. The other two did not register as encrypted, but they did not allow me access for some reason, which I did not pursue. Certainly, if I had made a directional antenna out of a coffee can like most war drivers, I might have picked up many more signals, but my exercise was to get a quick e-mail fix, not hijack all the Wi-Fi hot spots in Vermont.

The best news was that I did indeed find a free Internet cafe among the seven signals I trapped. One of the great attractions in Manchester is the Northshire Bookstore. Recently they added a large cafe that includes free Wi-Fi along with a computer for public use. Thanks to Northshire, now it’s cappuccino with Wi-Fi.

Of course, this discussion can’t help but bring up the question of Wi-Fi connection legality. Unfortunately, every government entity has an opinion and an equally ridiculous unenforceable consequence to go along with it. The all too typical pattern of legal thought these days is to presume that the guy who installs the unencrypted, publicly placed so everyone can trip over it, omnidirectional broadband transceiver has no responsibility. It’s the unfortunate sop with a laptop who happens to walk within range of this transmission who is the bad guy. Come on now.

The age of passing the buck has to stop. If we are going to have laws governing Wi-Fi and similar wireless technologies, it should be presumed that anything with public access is fair game if it isn’t encrypted or otherwise encoded to prohibit access. Instead of blaming the guy sitting in a coffee shop picking up a signal with his laptop, people should be forced to take responsibility for their Wi-Fi transmission when they install it. If they don’t want it to be public, they should turn on the safeguards. Accessing a public signal should not trigger legal consequences. But, hacking a signal when someone has taken pains to tell you that it isn’t public should.