Last summer I went to two of the most beautiful state parks I have ever visted. One of which was Myrtle Beach State Park in South Carolina. While visiting, I noticed that the park had free WiFi in the main office for park visitors. While this is very convenient, I’m not exactly sure why they decided a password was required. Especially when they post the password publicly for anyone to see on the door to enter the main office. Sorry, but having a password is pointless if you’re going to show it to everyone. Just make the WiFi connection open and be done with it. While you’re at it, for the love of God, block connections to MySpace. I hate trying to see what the weather is going to be like while all the teenagers in the campground are trying to stay in touch with people at home and clogging up the router with hundreds of useless gif images downloading. “ZOMG! I’M AT TEH CAMPGROUND TOTALLY CAMPING!!1!”.
I love this campground! There’s on-site washing machines and dryers, a nice little store in case you forget something at home, and a beautiful beach. The cherry on top? Free wifi for geeks like me! Woohoo!
Unfortunately, the wifi area is full of teenage girls on the armpit of the internet (MySpace) at all times. Such bandwidth hogs…Ugh! Luckily there are ways of “throttling” this type of misbehavior…
To keep things in order chronologically, I have posted a few wardriving videos that ran from 7-19-2008 to 7-26-2008 (still have a few more to post), but backdated them to their actual dates rather than post them using the current date as I put them together. You might want to take a peek back if wardriving interests you…enjoy!
Home of a couple of large bike rallieseach year, Myrtle Beach is not only huge, but full of things to do. I highly recommend Godfather’s pizza – it’s the best pizza in town by far! Just before we left, I had to whip out the laptop and partake in a bit of wardriving. This one is a two parter…
Part 1:
Part 2:
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina netstumbler files one, two, and three.
Materials: Compaq Presario laptop (2135US), Belkin wireless card (F5D6020), Kodak Digital Camera (C743), assistance from Rebecca.
Wow, what a beautiful area Carolina Beach was – definitely worth visiting if you’re in the area. The beaches were clean, the houses were gorgeous, and there were tons of wireless APs.
Well what else is a person supposed to do in Washington, DC other than see all the sites? Wardrive it of course! For more info on the wireless APs found, check out the netstumbler file. There are three videos – part 1, 2, and 3 because YouTube apparently only allows videos to be 10 minutes each.
After seeing enough of New York, I decided to head south and wardrive Scranton, Pennsylvania…and run a stop sign For more info on the wireless APs found, check out the netstumbler file.
While taking a road trip down the east coast, I decided to whip out the laptop in a few places. The first stop was Niagara Falls, New York. For more info on the wireless APs found, check out the netstumbler file. More videos to come shortly…
Materials: Compaq Presario laptop (2135US), Belkin wireless card (F5D6020), Kodak Digital Camera (C743), assistance from Rebecca, and don’t even get me started on gas…
I happened to be looking through the Saturn owner’s manual for something completely unrelated and found a page that ended up being a bit humorous. Apparently Saturn engineers went through all of the trouble to make sure that the remote transmitter didn’t send the same signal twice so that it couldn’t be “sniffed” and re-broadcast for a thief to break in. Unfortunately, when creating the owner’s manual, they decided to share how to bypass the security of the remote transmitter so that anyone with a Saturn transmitter can get into your car.
"Syncronization may be requried due to the security method used by this system. The transmitter does not send the same signal twice. The receiver will not accept a signal that has been sent to it more than once. This eliminates the possibility that the signal will be recorded and played back."
Now for the kicker. The very next sentence tells you how to bypass it:
"To syncronize your transmitter with the receiver, press and hold the LOCK and UNLOCK buttons on the transmitter, at the same time for about 10 seconds, near your Saturn."
Kind of senseless to go through all of that trouble to change the signal each time you use the remote. It takes a little more technical knowledge to record and retransmit a signal than it does to hold two buttons on a remote for 10 seconds. I would imagine that this method would be similar on other vehicles, so I guess it’s time to check your owner’s manual for something similar. Luckily the Saturn I drive does not have keyless entry.
Quite often you’ll see people with a pay-as-you-go cell phone when they feel they won’t use a cell phone enough to justify a $40+ per month payment. They work great for emergency-only purposes and to give younger kids an idea of the responsibilities involved with having a cell phone. While travelling through Wal-Mart, I happened to find a phone sitting on a shelf – a Motorola i415 Boost Mobile phone. After no luck attempting to find the owner, I decided to take the phone home with me and take a look at it as I have never played around with a phone like this before.
Luckily there was a decent charge on the phone that allowed me to write down the number of “Mom” and “Dad” to attempt to find the owner of the phone “Tennie”. However, before taking the phone back to the owner, I decided to play around a little bit. Two interesting things I found were an IP address associated with a message that was sent – 10.197.58.243. The other thing I found was that they had Yahoo! instant messenger installed and opted to save the login name and password in the phone. All one would have to do is connect and assume their online identity. Fortunately, after speaking with the owner of the phone, right after they realized they lost the phone, they called their service provider and reported the phone stolen so it couldn’t be used. This was good to hear.
The video is blurry, which probably isn’t a bad thing as it protects the information viewed on the phone from the general public. The point wasn’t to expose their personal information, but rather to explore a phone I had never played with before and do the right thing by returning it to the owner.
Materials: Motorola i415 Boost Mobile phone, Kodak Digital Camera (C743), assistance from Rebecca.
For more info on the wireless APs found, check out the netstumbler file.
