Comments on: WiFinder, WiFi Scanner Released

I just tried it out, and it detected my home network and the networks of the condos on either side of me. :) Scanning seems to be very fast, and the logging feature will work nicely for letting it run while driving to a location. Good work!

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com

Gee, maybe I'll let my wife have my T|T after all...

If it is really like NetStumbler, meaning it doesn't go in monitor mode...bah

Anybody knows if it puts the card in monitor/rfmon mode ? Or does it just send frames and wait for a reply ?

I use an Etrex Venture (although any Etrex will work along with a cable from
http://www.semsons.com/pdaincabforg.html
I use it with the software from Mapopolis. It works great together and Mapopolis will have dynamic routing with voice directions for Palm soon. I have it for PocketPC and it is one of the best naivigation software packages out there.
Kenal0

Palm OS 5.2 has new APIs to manipulate the WiFi hardware that aren't implemented for the Sony CLIEs with a CF 802.11b card. The just released Palm SG SDK has a header file that exposes the WiFi APIs on the device in much more detail than normally available through NetLib.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com

How about the NX80v and NX73v, what OS will they run? and if it is 5.2, will Wifinder work?

WiFinder will not work unless Sony adopts the same API set that the Tungsten C uses. If they do that (or even if they publish their current WiFi API) I will look into adding Sony support to WiFinder.

Previous experience with Sony does not leave me much hope though...

Mike, I hope something does break - I'd *LOVE* to have this on my Clie NZ90 and my WL100. One of the deciding factors in my buying the NZ90 instead of the T|C was the BlueTooth support, which I make use of often over my phone's GPRS connection. I don't use WiFi often, since I really only have access in the office - and I'm normally in front of a computer or two. So the T|C doesn't really do what I need.

I've wished for something like NetStumbler for the NZ just because it'd make the WiFi card more useful when out and about - and it it'd be just plain cool to WarWalk. ;-)

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
Eyrie Productions FanFic http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Many WiFi access points will show the MAC addresses that have connected, so yeah, they could see someone else used it.

And any traffic you send over their network unencrypted can be sniffed, of course. So if you use straight POP3/IMAP/SMTP (none of which are encrypted) then they can see the email. If you send a password in cleartext (say telnet instead of ssh) they'll see that too.

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
Eyrie Productions FanFic http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

OMG...that's a serious security issue...I hope hot-spot users are very careful and employ encryption in their emails and web sites.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981

Traffic can be sniffed one of two ways. First, if you're the owner of the AP, you could obviously put a sniffer on your system and watch any and all traffic going through your connection. After all, it is your connection.

Even more fun, if you lived in a high traffic area where people might be associating with your AP frequently, with a program like dsniff (http://www1.guardianagent.com:8080/downloads.asp?id=30) you could simply collect passwords indefinitely.

The other way is through wireless sniffers - although less common, they do exist. For example, during Comdex this past year a WiFi vendor was lending out free 802.11 cards to attendees so that the attendees could check their email. So, while sitting having my lunch one day I decided to fire up Aeropeek and see what I could find - told it to catch and POP3/SMTP traffic it saw going across the airwaves. In 20 minutes, I had captured several hundred emails. Of course, most were HTML emails ... and they had to be read in a packet dump ... but it did work.

My conclusions?

1. Never use an unencrypted AP. Period.

2. Us geeks have really boring email....

Toomer

www.guardianagent.com
Security Resources for Windows Admins

Yes, if they do a survey.

Anyone using Wifi should WEP their network, it;s a big loophole. I have mine, caught someone with a laptop in my garden the other day trying to warchalk, left this behind:

darkcompass.com
(W)
1mps

As it should be.

I also have a firewall with restricted ip access, so even if he did get through the 4 keys of encryption, he still would not get on as my stuff is all fixed ip, not dhcp.

Sorry, silly pooter.

As I was saying, I noticed a strong signal as I passed a LDS temple... it didn't seem to be WEP'd...

I knew that essentially all of them had sattelite dishes so they could stay in contact with Salt Lake City, but it would be interesting if they all had WiFi hotspots too...

I'll see if I can investigate - maybe I'll swing by there at lunch time and see what's happening...

Well, I could connect, and could even get onto the 'net...
but...
it felt like I was stuck on a 9600baud modem! It could have been just a bad WiFi connection, but it was pretty painful...

On that note, anyone know of an app that will test the speed of a connection?