New York and Boston are close enough that there's little difference in time between an airplane flight and a train ride door-to-door to downtown Manhattan. I prefer Amtrak--it's less disruptive, with no excruciating cab ride from LaGuardia and less walking overall.
While I spent the first hour-and-a-half of my latest train ride back to Boston writing a story about the trade show I had just attended, I let my computer do most of the heavy lifting for this column. I popped an Orinoco Silver wireless network adapter into my Sony PictureBook notebook and launched a clever application called Network Stumbler.
RUNNING IN A BACKGROUND WINDOW, Network Stumbler scans the airwaves for 802.11b wireless activity. If there's an access point or peer adapter within range, it lists it, along with some vital information, such as its Service Set Identifier (SSID)--an identifier that designates a logical network--and whether it uses encryption. If you have a global positioning system device attached to the PC, Network Stumbler even lists discovered devices' longitude and latitude, which you can then pinpoint on a map using mapping software.
Network Stumbler's results were revealing. I found 79 wireless devices: 76 were access points, and 3 were clients. Of these, only 19 access points had WEP security enabled. That means that, should I have had the time and interest, I could easily have piggybacked onto the others' network connections to get Internet access--in effect, stealing bandwidth. If their internal networks were poorly secured, I could have read and possibly even uploaded files onto their internal clients and servers.
Want to know which access points aren't secured? The only ones I can identify are MIT and the MIT Media Lab (and someone who chose Apt. 10A as his SSID). Kudos to Art Technology Group, Andor Capital Management, and CNET Networks for enabling WEP.
And which vendors have the largest share of the wireless networking market? Cisco and Agere, the Lucent spinoff that markets the WaveLAN and Orinoco brands, lead the list with 25 access points apiece. Other players included Linksys (11), Cabletron spinoff Enterasys (4), Addtron (3), D-Link (2), and Compaq (2).
I WAS SURPRISED at how few wireless access points I found on my train ride. Between Pennsylvania Station in New York and South Station in Boston, Network Stumbler turned up only 43 devices. The other 33 were all in and around Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., home of MIT and a hotbed of technology development. Of course, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor passes through marshes and across rivers as well as through a few cities, so maybe the low count isn't that surprising. Or maybe it indicates that, so far, wireless networking hasn't taken off in proportion to the amount of press it's getting.
This was certainly an unscientific survey, but it highlights just how easy it is to access networks if they leave a wireless hole open. If you're exploring wireless at work, or even at home--as many, myself included, are--use WEP if you want to keep your traffic private and your passwords hidden.
Are you disappointed with the state of wireless networking? Or have you had good luck with it? TalkBack to me!
Lee Schlesinger is the senior technology editor for ZDNet's Tech Update section.
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