WiFi everywhere
I recently spent Christmas vacation with my parents. They have a computer and cable Internet access, but no WiFi devices (yet). I turned on my laptop and a quick scan showed 19 (yes, nineteen) Access Points in range! After trying 2 or 3, I was able to browse the web. Now, I must caution that there are added risks when doing this. While most likely, it's just someone who doesn't realize that WiFi goes through walls and can easily be shared with neighbors, there's a small chance that they could be watching what you're doing (you are using their network after all).
On the flip side, I run an open AP. It's named "public" and I serve up free Internet access (well, for anyone within 100m or so). But that doesn't mean I want people to abuse it...
Last night, I notice that my Internet bandwidth is under heavy use. Could I be infected with a virus that's trying to spread itself? Could some other infected machine be hitting mine? I checked the graph, and it was symmetrical. That is, both upload and download were in heavy use. Well, either of my initial fears would have been one sided so it's probably something else. I run some traffic analysis and see that it's BitTorrent traffic. I use BT, but I wasn't at the time. Sure enough, it was coming from my WiFi AP. I double checked my wireless clients to make sure I hadn't accidentally started BT.... nope.
Connecting to the AP, I see that there is another user online. The name is similar to a nearby AP. So I'm sure my neighbor just booted up and didn't pay attention to which AP he connected to. Rather than do anything devious, I simply blocked his MAC addr so next time he should stay on his own AP. Both his client and AP start with the same two letters (capsed) as if they were initials. I clicked on over to Infospace and looked up a list of my neighbors (low turnover rate on my street). Sure enough the initials match the resident right next door to me (explains the strong signal strength).
So now the question is: Do I knock on my neighbor's door and say, "Sorry about dropping your BitTorrent connection from your Toshiba laptop last night, but you were using quite a lot of my bandwidth."? Or is that a bit too Big Brothery?
Ok, I can hear the question already: "If you don't want your neighbor on your AP, why call it 'public' with no encryption?" Well, casual use is fine, but I don't want someone hammering it, sucking all the upstream bandwidth and transferring potentially illegal files with IP as the source. I'll be installed firewall rules to block p2p stuff, but allow general web use.
On the flip side, I run an open AP. It's named "public" and I serve up free Internet access (well, for anyone within 100m or so). But that doesn't mean I want people to abuse it...
Last night, I notice that my Internet bandwidth is under heavy use. Could I be infected with a virus that's trying to spread itself? Could some other infected machine be hitting mine? I checked the graph, and it was symmetrical. That is, both upload and download were in heavy use. Well, either of my initial fears would have been one sided so it's probably something else. I run some traffic analysis and see that it's BitTorrent traffic. I use BT, but I wasn't at the time. Sure enough, it was coming from my WiFi AP. I double checked my wireless clients to make sure I hadn't accidentally started BT.... nope.
Connecting to the AP, I see that there is another user online. The name is similar to a nearby AP. So I'm sure my neighbor just booted up and didn't pay attention to which AP he connected to. Rather than do anything devious, I simply blocked his MAC addr so next time he should stay on his own AP. Both his client and AP start with the same two letters (capsed) as if they were initials. I clicked on over to Infospace and looked up a list of my neighbors (low turnover rate on my street). Sure enough the initials match the resident right next door to me (explains the strong signal strength).
So now the question is: Do I knock on my neighbor's door and say, "Sorry about dropping your BitTorrent connection from your Toshiba laptop last night, but you were using quite a lot of my bandwidth."? Or is that a bit too Big Brothery?
Ok, I can hear the question already: "If you don't want your neighbor on your AP, why call it 'public' with no encryption?" Well, casual use is fine, but I don't want someone hammering it, sucking all the upstream bandwidth and transferring potentially illegal files with IP as the source. I'll be installed firewall rules to block p2p stuff, but allow general web use.
posted by The Amigo at 4:14 PM
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3 Comments:
Oh, I dunno, I don't see anything too terribly Big Brothery about monitoring your own network! You can also in the process say you don't mind general legal use of your AP, which is why you left it open, but you've only got so much bandwidth to spare.
--L
It sounds a bit "Big Brothery" to me to go and speak to your neighbor or at the very least a bit "creepy". My guess is that the neighbor doesn't realize how intrusive he was on your bandwidth and would be creeped out at how closely you were observing him OR that he did know how intrusive he was being in which case blocking him will be a clear message to him.
2 of 3
I think that it would be a really great conversation piece to explain to him what you noticed and how you took action to determine, and prevent. I personally would relish someone showing me how I intersected with their life...
Chris
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