Do you know where your wireless Internet is coming from?

By Peter Vogel

Recently a colleague asked me about a issue he was having with a laptop wireless connection. He told me that the laptop had connected just fine to the Internet at his home for about six months, but that recently he was being prompted for access information.

In short, he could no longer connect the laptop to the Internet at home. However, he added, there was no problem connecting at school.

It was the latter point that convinced me that my colleague had been "piggybacking" on the wireless signals from unwitting neighbours, both at home and at school.

In school, use of our wireless transmitters is controlled, and I was pretty sure that my colleague didn't have the decryption access code; at least he'd never asked for one.

I asked him the name of the access point to which he'd connected at school and when he told me "linksys" I knew he had to have been using a neighbourhood signal. We change the names on our transmitters from the defaults provided by the manufacturers.

With that established, I enquired a little more into his circumstances at home. What sort of wireless router did he have, and who was his service provider?

"I don't have a wireless router," he began. "Isn't wireless free?"

That got me thinking back to the radio origins of the term "wireless," a voice or piece of music heard without the need for wires. Radio is generally "free," and so, in my colleague's mind, wouldn't wireless Internet operate similarly? If my colleague thought this way then it is likely many others do as well.

His assumption was that broadband Internet service to a home automatically came with a wireless component that would be "there" whenever he brought a laptop home. The term "wireless router" was, of course, completely foreign to him.

It appears that the neighbour eventually caught on that someone was using his service without authorization, or the neighbour might have changed his wireless router to one that had some form of access protection turned on by default, hence blocking my colleague's use.

Wireless access point manufacturers have traditionally shipped their gear in as close to "ready to use" form as they can. This usually means that when installed, the gear is set to a "wide open" state, broadcasting its presence with a generic name, blocking access to no one, and not encrypting its transmissions. Such settings cut down on customer service calls.

A few years ago there was a popular hobby among some computer experimenters that involved driving around with antenna-equipped laptops and recording freely accessible access points, so-called hotspots. Nowadays such hotspots are thought of as places such as coffee shops, libraries, and parks, where the access might be truly free or require a small hourly fee.

Some of these experimenters, known then as wardrivers, were looking for more than free Internet access. They were after corporate networks and, potentially, access to privileged information. Imagine the trouble an unwitting employee could cause if he bought an inexpensive wireless router at the local box store, plugged it into the corporate network outlet in his office, and then used it to feed his laptop.

Wireless signals don't stop at the first device they encounter. That office router broadcasts its signals far beyond the typical building wall or property line.

It is those sorts of signals that my colleague had come to regard as "free," and indeed, they were just that. However, it is unlikely that the owners of those signals intended them to be used beyond the confines of their homes.

In Canada the legality of using such signals is unclear. A generation ago B.C. cabinet minister Pat McGeer set up a satellite receiving station he had built himself on the steps of the Legislative Buildings in Victoria and challenged the CRTC to "come and get me" for intercepting then-forbidden television signals from across the border.

If you have a wireless router in your home should you have concerns about its operation? So ubiquitous are these devices that there's no practical point in worrying if someone is sitting outside your home trying to break into your computers. You should be concerned, however, that someone can use your Internet feed to conduct nefarious business that would point back to you.

Turn on even the most basic security features in your wireless router. Most can be set so that they don't broadcast their presence. All offer some level of encryption, meaning that a set of characters must be supplied in order to gain use of the signal.

Most basic of all, you might consider putting a simple electronic timer on the power supply to the router so that the device is off at hours you never use it. If it's not on it can't possibly be compromised!

In an interview with The BCC, Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, observes that there is little urgency for government to act in this area. He notes that he doesn't see the harm in people opening their networks to increase broader accessibility.

I don't have a problem with that thinking, as long as it's done with the full understanding of the wireless router's owner. If it's done out of ignorance, because the product came out of the box that way, it can hardly be considered voluntary sharing of an individual's Internet service.

Interesting site of the week

For all you "to do" list makers: Tada Lists. Of course in this age of Web 2.0 products, these are more than the electronic equivalent of scraps of paper. They can be shared with friends or project collaborators or even posted publicly. It's free at www.tadalist.com.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.