Warchalking
en.wikipedia.orgThis isn’t something anyone used, it was a meme.
See, in 2005 John Hodgeman (PC in the old Mac vs. PC Apple ads) published “The Areas of My Expertise” [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Areas_of_My_Expertise#Th...], including a description of hobo signs and 700 hobo names. Hodgeman was on The Daily Show and the hobo thing took off for a few minutes.
I went to one of Hodgeman’s signings during that book tour. Jonathan Coulton was there during his his “Thing a Week” project and traditional Hot Fries and brandy (or bourbon?) were served. I bought a copy of the book and some hobo chalk for my brother.
We were talking when Hodgeman went to sign my copy of the book. He asked my name and started to write “To Mike”.. I blurted out “No! It’s for my brother!” He looked up at me and let out a sigh before looking down and continuing without pause: “To Mike — If you wish you may give this to <brother’s name>”. Always wondered if he had that one chambered or if he came up with it on the spot. Either way, brilliant, and, 100% in character given the tone of the book.
I did a little 'war-driving", mostly just to feel part of the scene. At that point I'd never met anyone, knowingly, who used Linux. I was running Slackware, installed on 7 or 8 diskettes, on a Pentium-S ThinkPad. I only found the APs, never cracked them.
I have once seen warchalk showing an open wifi point (in a city in the UK).
This would be pre-2005 fwiw.
This reminded me of the morning my wife and I decided to semantically classify all of Hodgeman’s 700 Hoboes. https://dmd.3e.org/2006-07-22-the-semantics-of-hoboes/
Judging by his podcast “Judge John Hodgman”, I’d say he’s an extremely clever individual. His shoot from the hip material is so clever sometimes it makes me wonder if it’s entirely scripted.
"This isn’t something anyone used, it was a meme."
It is a meme in the Dawkins' sense of the word. The set of three symbols contains the necessary and sufficient information to connect to an open wireless node (has-content or purpose). Warchalk symbols can *mutate* by being drawn expertly (think surface location and size) or poorly (bad handwriting makes SSID illegible) and can be deployed expertly (sign marks the location of highest signal strength) or poorly (sign only gives general area--YMMV). Warchalking can *replicate*, because once I demonstrate these symbols, any techie could replicate the Warchalking meme.
The cultural context of 2002 is really interesting. In 2002 and we're still on 802.11a/b. The Apple AirPort was out at that time. As I recall, you were required to set it up (didn't have default SSID/password), and you could leave it open. You might just do that if you're not so hip to the whole SSID and WEP terminology, and thinking differently about you network's security--more simply as a computer hardware consumer. And Jonny Ive was making some smart looking Apple products that sparked consumer consumption. Lots of product in the hands of novice computer users.
Piracy was huge! Software (Hotline) and music (Napster). The punk ethic (going to war against the man/corporations), before music industry went on it's own war against piracy. I would even go as far to suggest (software) piracy and it's punk ethic was rebranded as "darkweb" full of terrorists and predators.
Squat and Gobble and coffee shops were adding WIFI to attract customers. Warchalking demonstrates to a decision maker it doesn't take much information to communicate this service to these potential laptop carrying high-income customers. You don't have to "Warchalk" to get something useful out the Warchalking meme.
People leaving their networks open is just bad network security. It was never going to last to become widely adopted practice. (Now all of our routers come pre-configured with default SSID and passwords--that's another story, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_password).
Warchalking, no matter how many people did this (five or five hundred people), it still works as a meme. It communicates, it mutates, and it replicates. Brilliant.
Similar street language? "Colorful Language: Decoding Utility Markings Spray-Painted on City Streets (2018)" https://99percentinvisible.org/article/colorful-language-dec...
Wardriving is something necessary when you are too broke in America and every McBurgerHut has wifi. I wish I came across warchalks too. That would've been a great help
In Europe it's way cheaper to buy mobile data than paying for fuel to drive to an open access point...
Don't forget: we have those crappy UPC routers everywhere. In every street, at least 5-10 are still upcgen affected and 1-3 usually never change the default passwords.
It gets worse once you dig deeper and find out how T-Online, vodafone and o2 hotspots work.
[1] for the curious: https://github.com/yolosec/upcgen
War walking.
War transit riding
I mean the trains have free wifi in the Netherlands, so that kind of works.
More expensive than just driving to your destination though.
wigle.net is really handy for finding open wifi networks when you want to work outside or use the internet without a data plan.
Agreed, although they seem on a mission to eliminate open wifi networks; the homepage has a prominent graph celebrating the growth over time of secured APs.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I was adjacent to the folks who came up with this (I think it was almost entirely Matt Jones' work creating that PDF). The symbols were intended to be useful, and there was a flurry of subsequent usage (including official labels at cafes, etc). It didn't have a huge amount of organic growth, but it was a form that journalists could write about, and it made more concretely explicable the somewhat trickier but more prevalent concept of wardriving.
It may have been an artifact of the time, but it remains to me surprising how quickly and easily a timely and well-packaged idea can catch people's attention and propagate, even now. (Note that warchalking preceded John Hodgeman's book, but he too was playing off the background curiousity of hobo signs. There's no necessary origin point for combinations like this. You're just mixing and matching what's in the air.)
Our same rough circle of people are why you talk of Betteridge's law, life-hacking, or even know about that Steve Balmer "Developers! Developers!" video. If it didn't come through that route, those concepts or presentations would almost emerged from some other corner of the online world. There was no ulterior motive, no intent to get rich or famous, just people playing as they do with what's interesting in the world around them, and the ideas they spark.
I remember reading about warchalking at the time. I thought it was the coolest idea. I had a Titanium MacBook and knew the difficulty for finding WiFi. You could find open routers at that time. I lived in the suburbs, but I imagined it would be cool to try in the city. I was socializing in the Burning Man community then, and my friends and I were drawn to hacking ideas like this.
Everything old is new again:
What should one chalk for a Meshtastic node?
I think this is still covered on the CEH exam. Or at least mentioned along with war dialing, wardiving, etc.
Yeah it was when I was going through a university class based on CEH about ten years ago. It includes war chalking and a bunch of other questionable subjects (BlackBerry Bluetooth stack attacks?). The whole experience left me feeling the certification is a waste of time unless an employer is asking for it (I'm on the swe side so certs are not applicable to me thankfully).
When I looked into war chalking and how it's discussed, I found that most of the news at the time was based on an FBI notice to businesses, which was picked up by the media as the ridiculous story it was. I honestly doubt it actually happened, beyond the two or three Usenet posters that inspired the notice.
Can't think why, given that it was little more than a short lived LARP.
The entire security certification syllabus is this way.
CEH exam?
Certified Ethical Hacker, a certification from ECC.
https://www.eccouncil.org/train-certify/certified-ethical-ha...
This seems like an unusually thinly hyperlinked Wikipedia article, no? Who is Matt Jones, for example?
Related: are there wifi password cracking apps for iOS and Android?
There are couple of local terminal emulators in the App Store. I'm sure if you could source the binary you could run one of the linux tools. You could probably even build it from source if that's your jam.
Very unlikely you’d be able to run any of the cracking tools to actually crack a local wireless network since those require raw access to the wireless NIC to capture/transmit frames as it would require root.
With rooted Android it might be possible if you can shut down anything else that might be accessing the NIC (Android’s NetworkManager equivalent) but otherwise you’re out of luck.
Thankfully insecure/broken crypto WiFi is mostly a thing of the past.
didn't know about this, installing a-shell now. thanks!
iSH is pretty neat too. It’s an Alpine container, you can apk add whatever you want.
The reference to WEP makes this sound pretty dated. Has anybody encountered these in the wild?
(I went to a restaurant recently that had its WiFi profile on a QR code, which I found very convenient.)