Wi fidelity Searching for wireless Internet networks in Portland: not as futile as one might think BY JESS KILBY
	WARDRIVING PORTLAND We found these networks using just our WiFi-enabled laptop computer and, occasionally, a WiFi Finder. No antenna, no stumbling software. All of the networks are " open " — in other words, they don’t have WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) enabled. This doesn’t necessarily mean they were intended to be left open. We’ve identified each network by its name (we don’t necessarily know who the host is in every case, though " regency " and others are pretty obvious). Several, however, simply bear the default name that the WiFi equipment shipped with. (One of them is actually called " default. " ) Remember that bad weather can make it harder to find networks, and happy hunting! 1. regency: the Portland Regency Hotel 2. art: Milk/Silver/Fore streets area 3. harthotels: Portland Harbor Hotel 4. the hub: Silver/Middle/Franklin streets area 5. abc123: Commercial St. around Silver St. block 6. myersys: parking lot of Key Bank on Commercial St. (next to DiMillo’s) 7. singledigits: DiMillo’s wharf 8. netgear: Congress St. between Avon and Park streets 9. mercy: Mercy Hospital 10. wireless: Exchange and Middle streets area 11. wirelessinet: Franklin and Middle streets area 12. BCP: Middle St. between Silver and Pearl streets 13. dataleapnetworks: Franklin and Commercial streets area 14. default: Commercial St. at Moulton St. block — JK

We’re cruising the narrow cobblestone streets of the Old Port, pointing a small silver device out the window as we roll by office buildings and antique shops, until suddenly the lone, flickering red light turns to a pulsing row of green.

"We got one!"

My trusty driver swerves to the curb and I pull out the laptop. Five magic words hover in the bottom right corner of the screen: Network detected, signal strength good. Oh yeah, baby. Who ya gonna call?

This is wardriving — the search for wireless internet networks (named after the old-school hacking practice of "war dialing" to find modem connections) — and, in ostensibly lo-fi Portland, two days of sniffing the ether yields some pretty decent results.

Though WiFi (wireless fidelity) is enjoying a boom in popularity among early adopters of shiny, pretty, fast things, it’s hard to discern exactly how much the average computer user knows about wireless technology, except that "WiFi" is both fun and easy to say, even three times fast.

Which is rather fitting, because, once you understand the basic concepts involved, using WiFi is also fun and easy. And fast. (And sorta shiny.)

This is how it works: These days, until and unless the entire Internet goes wireless (which is highly unlikely, for reasons we’ll get to later), every connection to the Internet can be traced back to a wire running into a wall. For most of us, this is a cable or fiber-optic connection, though some people still use their phone lines (poor, crazy bastards). All these wires comprise a physical infrastructure that must be installed and maintained, often at prohibitive costs.

Now, to go WiFi, you take this "landline" connection, and attach to it a device that broadcasts and receives data on specific radio frequencies. This transceiver is your base station, though it has many other names (gateway, router, access point) depending on the nuances of its function.

Next you take your laptop or desktop computer, your PDA, or any other wireless-enabled device, and give it a WiFi radio. Most new laptops come with one embedded, but for older models it’s as simple as buying a PC card, which will set you back about $30. Similar, smaller cards exist for PDAs, and most desktop PCs will take an external radio that connects to the machine via a USB cable.

Thus, all of your devices with WiFi radios can talk to your base station, which in turn connects those devices to the Internet. Voila, wireless Internet access. (The base station doesn’t have to be connected to the Internet, incidentally — it can be used to network a room full of computers to just each other.)

So what use is WiFi to the average computer user? It may seem like technological masturbation to set up a wireless network in a 750-square-foot apartment, just so a laptop connected to a stereo in the living room can play the mp3s stored on the hard drive of a PC two rooms away. And, uh, it is.

But the fun begins when you get off your own network and go looking for somebody else’s. See, if I happen to be close enough to your base station, I can use it, too, even though I might actually be in your driveway.

WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE

Like all things that seem too good to be true, it should be mentioned that gaining free Internet access via somebody else’s WiFi network is currently the subject of some debate in the tech community. Is it stealing? Or is an unsecure network fair game? Cast in a more positive light: Can wardrivers assume that a publicly accessible network was left that way on purpose, as a sort of ad-hoc community resource?

Sean Gilman, of the Portland-based Systems Engineering, sees it both ways.

"I mean, you’re taking something that doesn’t belong to you — that’s theft," he says.

On the other hand, "if you’re crazy enough to leave it wide open, people are going to use it."

The debate is relevant primarily because each user on a network will suck precious bandwidth from the person actually paying the bills on that account, to the tune of 1 to 11 Mbps (megabits per second) per average user out of an available 250 KBps (kilobytes per second). Start transferring large files and the required bandwidth quickly escalates.

So touchy is the issue that those in the burgeoning wardriving community are adamant about the distinction between looking for networks and actually connecting to them — claiming they only engage in the former.

Officially speaking, it remains to be seen which side the law will come down on — in regards to both wardriving and piggybacking on open networks — but precedence indicates that it will be up to the owner of a wireless network to make sure that network is secure. (This assumes, of course, that WiFi mooches are merely surfing the Web, not trying to crack into the host’s system. That’s already illegal.)

The fact that the mooch-or-not debate even exists is due to another touchy WiFi subject: security. While some hotels and retail chains now offer their customers (and anybody parked outside) free WiFi access, many other "public" networks are being offered entirely by accident.

In an attempt to make wireless technology more accessible to the average consumer, manufacturers of WiFi hardware and software are releasing their products with even the most basic security feature turned off. The security system is called WEP (wireless encryption protocol), and though some security experts criticize it as weak, and crackable in under an hour by a skilled hacker, it still keeps out the riff-raff. Netstumblers who encounter a WiFi network with WEP enabled won’t be able to get online via that network unless they have the encryption key — and WEP sends a clear message, should such a distinction ever become legally relevant, that this bandwidth is not for public consumption.

But enabling WEP can make it tricky to get a network up and running, which means companies like Linksys, a leading WiFi-equipment manufacturer out of California, doesn’t ship its products with WEP turned on.

"We’re not going to do security by default because it adds an extra step and a little bit of complexity to the start-up process," Linksys marketing director Michael Wagner told the Washington Post in a July 27 article about WiFi’s vulnerabilities.

Until these issues are sorted out in court or in the Legislature, we’ll have to follow our own instincts when it comes to "borrowing" bandwidth. But if you’re picking up your neighbor’s signal, it might be nice to ask before you jump online.

SNIFFING AND STUMBLING

So now you know what WiFi is, and you understand the moral gray area inhabited by certain aspects of the technology. But how do you find the hot spots?

There are several options, some of which cost more than others. The most bare-bones (and usually least successful) method is to simply go out with a WiFi-enabled device and turn it on. Between the software that comes with the WiFi equipment and the wireless-networking software that might already exist on your computer (depending on the platform and version you’re working with), your machine should automatically detect any networks in the area. Again, depending on the particular software, you might have to hit "refresh" or "connect" buttons to continue searching or actually get online, but these things are usually pretty easy to figure out. If you detect a hot spot but can’t connect, you’ve either encountered a WEP-protected network or the signal is too weak. There’s nothing you can do about the former; the latter might cost you little more than a can of Pringles to resolve.

Because WiFi works on radio principles, reception can be improved by getting closer to the broadcast source (if you can locate it), and also by using an antenna. Like any good piece of technology, WiFi antennas comes in two varieties: store-bought and homemade. An off-the-shelf antenna will run you anywhere from $30 to upwards of $150; the DIY variety will set you back about $10, and maybe a few ounces of flab — because yes, it’s literally made of an empty Pringles can. Check out semi-professional "cantennas" at www.ethernetdesigns.com . For instructions on building your own cantenna, visit www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html

Also helpful in finding WiFi networks are specialized utilities that are a step above the bare-bones system software mentioned above, collectively known as wireless network sniffers. The most popular is Network Stumbler, more commonly known as Netstumbler and available for download at www.netstumbler.com (PC only). For Linux there’s dstumbler (www.dachb0den.com/projects/dstumbler.html) and kismet (www.kismetwireless.net). Mac users, try istumbler (www.istumbler.net).

While these sniffers don’t have much more functionality than your system software, their user interface is designed to present network information (WEP status, signal strength, GPS location) in a more convenient format. And they’re all free, which makes them worth at least a test drive.

Last, for gadget freaks who don’t mind dropping $30 on a new, buggy piece of technology, there’s the Kensington WiFi finder, a little piece of silver plastic with green and red indicator lights. In theory, pressing the sole button on the device triggers two minutes of scanning for WiFi networks, during which time the red light flashes periodically. Then, the green lights flash briefly — one or both of them, depending on signal strength — if a network is detected.

In reality, the red light is hard to see in bright sunlight — we actually shelled out $20 for replacement batteries a week after we bought our finder because we thought the thing had died — and it seems to be hit or miss in detecting networks (hint: If you have your laptop turned on, and you’re getting crazy-strong green lights on the finder, it’s probably picking up the laptop’s WiFi signal).

Hopefully, finder technology will improve without the price going up too much — which is entirely likely if WiFi can survive the current security debate and resistance from cable providers who don’t want to lose customers.

COMMUNITY ACCESS

Though we found more than a dozen open networks on the peninsula without the aid of an antenna or any stumbling software — and Systems Engineering’s Gilman found many more than that when he used both tools during his own wardriving venture several months ago — WiFi has hardly reached its full potential in Maine. Walk into the nearest Starbucks and ask if there’s a network; though the coffee chain is offering wireless access at locations nationwide, the baristas in Portland will merely respond with blank stares.

And though the Old Port was hopping with networks, our antenna-less search in other public spots like Monument, Congress, and Longfellow squares yielded nada. Downtown is ripe for the city, the Chamber of Commerce, Portland Downtown District, or some other savvy entity to coordinate a Portland WiFi project.

For now, though, it appears that individual businesses and residential users are on their own in cobbling together a continuous WiFi network that could blanket all of downtown. John Noone, communications manager for the Greater Portland Chambers of Commerce, says WiFi isn’t a topic the chamber is exploring. And Jack Lufkin, director of economic development for the city of Portland, says the city’s current agenda is simply to stay out of the way of WiFi development.

"Wireless Internet is a great option for a number of businesses, and personally I’d like to see it be as available as any other form of Internet connectivity," Lufkin says. "I just don’t know what the city would do, other than encourage the marketplace and the business community to make that product available."

Lufkin says that if there are any city regulations that would prohibit the installation of WiFi antennas and other equipment around the city, "we can certainly look into that — but at this point in time, I don’t think that the regulations provide a real barrier."

The good news, according to local WiFi installers like Jeremy Cameron of Simple Solutions, is that business is booming. Cameron’s been setting up small-business WiFi networks in Portland for a year now, and he says there’s been a definite uptick in wireless interest during the last six months.

But it’s the rural parts of Maine where WiFi is truly poised to be a hero. Cable and fiber, as previously mentioned, are expensive to lay — as much as $30,000 a mile. And telecommunications companies aren’t exactly tripping over themselves to extend their services to sparsely populated areas.

"Anything west of Raymond, there’s no broadband," Gilman says, "because Time Warner doesn’t want to run fiber cable when there’s only 2500 people in the town.

"So what you do is you rent a tower, put up a wireless access point, relay it to the nearest cable. That’s where I see wireless being really effective."

It remains to be seen whether the telecom giants, unwilling to service these rural customers, will lean on federal and state regulators — or employ other tactics — to inhibit or kill the growth of WiFi. But things are looking good so far. In fact, devices embedded with the new "Wireless G" standard (short for 802.11g, the technical specifications for how WiFi works, as created in 1997 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) have finally hit the shelves. At a data-transfer rate of 54 Mbps, Wireless G smokes its 11-Mbps predecessor, 802.11b.

Shiny, pretty, fast. Get your war(driving) on.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com