Is it a morally dubious illegal activity, or simply
taking advantage of excess bandwidth? Warchalking, or making chalk
marks on walls or pavements to indicate a wireless access point,
has caused a media buzz over the past 12 months. Nick Langley asks
whether warchalking has lived up to the hype
There are parts of the world where trainspotters and
planespotters are at risk of arrest because the locals cannot
understand such quintessentially British preoccupations.
Warchalking breaches a new frontier in such hobbies, in that even
the British, by and large, do not understand it. Its practitioners
are at risk not only from the police and private security
organisations, but also from being attacked and having their
possessions stolen while wandering alone at night.
Warchalking is the practice of making chalk marks on walls or
pavements to indicate a wireless access point. The mark may be
placed by the owner of the wireless network or the owner may know
nothing about it. The wireless access point can be found using
specialist software on a laptop or handheld device. If an open node
is found, it can be used to access the internet or check
e-mails.
The chalked symbols are supposedly based on those used by hobos
during the depression in the US to indicate a household where food
and shelter might be expected or one where the reception might be
less generous.
Matt "Blackbelt" Jones, an information architect, created the
warchalking symbols and posted them on the internet. But freelance
writer Ben Hammersley had already come up with the idea of opening
his network up to neighbours and passers-by, and it was Hammersley
who chalked the first mark outside his house.
However, the buzz over warchalking, so loud last summer, died down
before the end of the year. One website, www.warchalking.org, ran
an obituary in January 2003 with the headline "How warchalking
died". It was possibly a premature move, as the site was still
receiving posts from new enthusiasts in June.
Warchalking might have provided an opportunity for some people to
get out more, but few seem to have taken it. When did you last see
a warchalking mark? Have you ever seen one?
The New York Times made warchalking one of its "ideas of the year"
and www.wired.com, www.slashdot.org and several other serial bibles
of the zeitgeist made much of it. Some commentators saw it as the
next step in the freedom of the internet. One or two said it was
being talked up by the media for the benefit of their advertisers,
paving the way for paid-for public Wi-Fi services and adding an
edge to the otherwise mundane business of using your laptop to stay
in touch with the office.
Warchalkers are, or were, driven by a variety of motives, among
which getting free wireless access seems strangely unimportant.
Finding open nodes is a hit-and-miss business. Nodes marked as open
may no longer be open, particularly if the owner of the network has
seen the mark and decided to lock out gatecrashers. Even if a node
is open, it is often impossible to do anything with it without
getting involved in illegal activities; uninvited network sharing
being something of a legal grey area.
On a walk along the London Wall recorded on culture and politics
website www.metamute.com, Matt Jones, one of the authors, found 20
nodes. Only one node was open but Jones was unable to access the
internet from it.
For Jones, one pleasure of searching for open nodes is walking the
streets looking at architecture. He confessed that warchalking is
like trainspotting, with the names of access points replacing lists
of serial numbers.
Others get pleasure simply from chalking. "I got back in the car, a
mild rush flowing through me at having completed my first
warchalk," said Ron Chrisley, research fellow in artificial
intelligence at the University of Birmingham, after a night on the
streets with some chalk and an iPaq. "I did not know where to go
next; all I knew is that I wanted more. And an open node wouldn't
hurt either."
Chrisley found other thrills. "Every few seconds or so I would look
down at the Mini-stumbler [the software used for locating nodes]
display between my legs - wardriving is dangerous! Especially when
an open node pops up unexpectedly, as it did at this point."
For some the attraction is intellectual. "Warchalking to me is more
a philosophy of connectivity and communication and not something I
would actually do," said one comment on www.warchalking.org.
Another respondent wrote, "Sure, there was a lot of buzz around the
concept, but how many people really do it? I have never, ever seen
chalk marks out in the wild."
The site ran an online questionnaire to discover how many people
had actually warchalked. Twenty eight per cent of the respondents
were only interested in the theory of warchalking and had not
warchalked themselves.
For those warchalkers that do mark out access points, some chalk
the marks on pavements, assuming that while walls tend to be owned
by somebody, the ground is a free public arena. The police will
usually take a lenient view of what could be classed as pavement
art, but scribbling on pavements, like spraying tags on walls, is
actually criminal damage. Even though the chalk marks may be washed
away with the rain, the marks are still covered by the term
"temporary functional derangement", which sounds as though it could
be applied to the perpetrators as well as their
perpetrations.
Ethical justifications for warchalking include the peace-and-love
stance, with warchalkers saying that they do not mind sharing their
networks, so why can't others share their networks with them?
Another attitude is the rather more boneheaded comparison where if
you leave your door open and you are robbed, it is your fault for
giving the thieves the opportunity.
"If people are so stupid they set up their wireless access points
to be open, then it serves them right. The world is full of bad
system administrators who need to be taught a lesson," said one
cyberguerrilla.
One contributor on www.warchalking.org made the point that a lot of
people have fixed- rate wireless broadband contracts, so a bit of
freeloading on bandwidth they are not using will not be missed.
Uninvited guests checking e-mail or looking at a few web pages is
hardly going to stop owners enjoying the full benefit of their
bandwidth. But others point out that some subscribers pay by the
hour or by the byte, so they will get billed for alien
traffic.
The majority opinion on www. warchalking.org is that using other
people's bandwidth is ethically dodgy, and you should not take
advantage of those who do not have the expertise to make their own
networks secure.
Warchalking falls foul of at least two laws. Section 4 of the Theft
Act 1968 says things that may be stolen include "money and all
other property, real or personal, including things in action and
other intangible property".
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 makes it an offence to gain
unauthorised access to a computer system, punishable by six months
in jail, a £2,000 fine or both, regardless of whether the motives
are malicious or not.
Ironically, warchalkers themselves are at increased risk from
street theft, as they wander around with laptops, often after dark.
Chrisley has taken his iPaq onto the streets of Birmingham late at
night, despite having been robbed three times and assaulted once in
the previous nine months. Jones recalls warchalking in parts of New
York where he felt uncomfortable carrying his laptop.
The fall in warchalking has been attributed to the rise in public
wireless Lan services, either those that are paid for or laid on by
coffee shop owners as an inducement to hang around and buy more
muffins.
There is also a growing number of community wireless initiatives,
providing free wireless broadband in towns and villages -
particularly those the broadband providers have passed by.
But one comment on www.warchalking.com may give the real reason
warchalking is dying. "I am afraid that warchalking is in danger of
being washed away by the lack of active chalkers. Perhaps that is
the ultimate test. Unless people are prepared to make a record of
their netstumbling for the sake of others, warchalking will not
last."
Community wireless sites:
www.warchalking.org
www.communitywireless.org
www.consume.net
Ron Chrisley's warchalking diary:
www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rlc/warring/warring.html
Finding open nodes on the London Wall:
www.metamute.com
Get the T-shirt:
www.wardrivingisnotacrime.com
Warchalking symbols
There are three main warchalking symbols:
- A circle indicates a closed wireless network
- A wireless network that been generously or inadvertently left
open is denoted by two half-moons back to back
- A circle with a "W" in the middle indicates a Wired Equivalent
Privacy encrypted node.
For more detailed information on warchalking symbols go
to:
http://www.cape-mac.org/wireless/symbols/index.html
Glossary
- Aerosol - Wardriving utility for Windows.
- Netstumbler - A Windows utility for 802.11b-based wireless
network auditing. Used by warchalkers and wardrivers to find
wireless access points. Available for most laptops and wireless
cards, it can be downloaded from
www.netstumbler.com.
Netstumbling Walking about with your eyes glued to the Netstumbler
display instead of looking where you are going. Warchalking
Marking the sites of wireless access points with a special
symbol.
- Wardialling - An early form of hacking involving dialling
random numbers in the hope of finding a modem attached to a
computer. Derived from the 1983 film War Games, the ultimate origin
of the war prefix.
- Wardriving - Searching for wireless access points by driving
around with Netstumbler on your laptop. Internet services firm KPMG
found most wardriving takes place while people are driving to and
from work and very little takes place at weekends. Warstorming
Searching for wireless access points from a plane. Because of the
limited range of wireless Lans, the plane has to fly below 1,500m.
First recorded in Perth, Australia.
- Wapchalking - Variant of warchalking set up by the Wireless
Access Point Sharing Community, an informal group with a code of
conduct that forbids the use of access points without permission.
The group uses the warchalking marks as an invitation to network
owners to join their community. In Wapchalking terms, the two
half-moon open node mark means a wireless access device is
currently indicating factory default settings. "In our community's
code, that means it is classified as a 'clueless' device," the
group said.
Wardriving - Searching for wireless access points by driving
around with Netslumber on your laptop. Internet services firm KPMG
found most wardriving takes place while people are driving to and
from work and very little takes place at weekends.
Warstorming: Searching for wireless access points from a plane.
Because of the limited range of wireless Lans, the plane has to fly
below 1,500m. First recorded in Perth, Australia.
Wapchalking - Variant of warchalking set up by the Wireless
Access Point Sharing Community, an informal group with a code of
conduct that forbids the use of access points without permission.
The group uses the warchalking marks as an invitation to network
owners to join their community. In Wapchalking terms, the two
half-moon open node mark means a wireless access device is
currently indicating factory default settings. "In our community's
code, that means it is classified as a 'clueless' device," the
group said.
Warchalking survey
A survey conducted by
www.warchalking.com shows
how few warchalkers actually go out and warchalk and how, despite
the ethic of sharing networks, few had made their home networks
open to all.
Have you warchalked yet? l
- Sure, I warchalked my house (7%)
- Sure, I warchalked my office (3%)
- Sure, I warchalked the secret government agency down the road
(10%)
- Nah, I'm just interested in theoretical warchalking (28%)
- No, I do not know what warchalking is yet (18%)
- No, but I will as soon as I find some chalk (32%).
War on warchalking
The FBI in Pittsburgh sent a memo to local businesses warning them
that the appearance of warchalking symbols outside their offices
meant the security of their networks had been jeopardised
KPMG in London set up a honeypot, a dummy wireless access point
containing monitoring software, which it used to gather survey data
about wireless hacking as a marketing tool for its security
services
AT&T Broadband sent out wardrivers of its own to track down
open wireless access points and check if they were being shared
against the terms of its contracts.