WAR Driving with an iPhone
Yesterday I discovered, quite accidently, that
you can use an iPhone for WAR driving.
The iPhone is capable of both wireless access
over AT&T's digital EDGE network and 802.11 networks. There's a Settings
menu that lets you specify wireless networks you can join. There's an option to
have it discover these and ask if you want to join any discovered. This can be
quite handy since the throughput is much higher over the 802.11
networks.
So I was outside my apartment building yesterday and wanted to check my e-mail. The iPhone asked me if I wanted to join a wireless network it discovered. That was a surprise because I didn't realize there were many wireless networks around the apartment complex.
Here's the wireless settings screen with the access points it found.
As you can see there were quite a few access points around me, though none of them were very strong. Two of them were unlocked too.
This made me curious. I started walking around the parking lot with my iPhone held like that and watched how the wireless signals appeared and disappeared.
At one point I came across another WAP named "linksys" that was wide open and very strong. By the way, there were several access points named "linksys". Obviously lots of folks take those base stations out of the box and just turn them on.
Technically, I guess since I was walking this wasn't really WARdriving. But I never considered to use an iPhone to scan for access points before.
So I was outside my apartment building yesterday and wanted to check my e-mail. The iPhone asked me if I wanted to join a wireless network it discovered. That was a surprise because I didn't realize there were many wireless networks around the apartment complex.
Here's the wireless settings screen with the access points it found.
As you can see there were quite a few access points around me, though none of them were very strong. Two of them were unlocked too.
This made me curious. I started walking around the parking lot with my iPhone held like that and watched how the wireless signals appeared and disappeared.
At one point I came across another WAP named "linksys" that was wide open and very strong. By the way, there were several access points named "linksys". Obviously lots of folks take those base stations out of the box and just turn them on.
Technically, I guess since I was walking this wasn't really WARdriving. But I never considered to use an iPhone to scan for access points before.
Posted: Tuesday - July 10, 2007 at 08:57 PM |
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Published On: Jan 19, 2008 09:36 PM
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Published On: Jan 19, 2008 09:36 PM