wtfwasithinking.org

Its been a long while since I’ve last participated in wardriving. Today i made up for it though. I had to reinstall gpsdxconfig and the drivers for my usb gps unit.* After that though, its all working fine again, even on leopard. after checking to make sure i had the latest version of kismac, I hit the road.

My first outing for the day was up the Cohoes bike path. I put Ally in the stroller and my powerbook underneath. After getting the gps positioned on top and kismac fired up, I turned the brightness off. Even with the gps and wifi card on, I still had plenty of battery life for about an hour and a half of warwalking. I’m hoping to get in a good two hour walk tomorrow.

The second outing went very well. 128 wifi points with coordinates traveling by car from Cohoes to albany then Colonie. It probably would have been higher, but i used a lot of highways.

It felt good to get back into wardriving. There is a feeling of satisfaction, seeing the data i’ve collected and the path marked out on google earth.

Some Resources:

• wigle.net
• kismac
• http://www.wardriving.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving
• http://www.wardrive.net/

Before you ask… No, I don’t wardrive to find access points to connect to. I don’t wardrive to break the wep key on users routers to get into their systems. I wardrive to see what is out there and to see who has been smart enough to lock down their signal. You can get a lot of insight as to the type of people are in your neighborhood by looking at ssid’s and access limits.

* It appears that the Holux GM-210 USB GPS unit is discontinued. If you should be able to get your hands on one for cheap, I paid about $12, don’t use the drivers on the disk. Find someplace to download them from. I’ve got the OS X drivers saved if a mac user should need them.