Went on my first war drive tonight. I was doing more of the driving then the warring. If anyone here is uninitiated, War Driving is the act of driving around (in a car) with a laptop that has wireless networking capabilities (not a car). Slap in some software (we used Netstumbler, by far the most-used piece of wardriving software, but not the only one in existence) and you’re able to drive along merrily detecting wireless access points of businesses and home owners alike.

For the car, we used my van, and for the laptop, we used Andrew’s “new” computer. I believe it’s this one. I use the quotes around new because, while Andrew has HAD the laptop since around January, he only just mentioned it to any of our group about a week ago. I found this exceptionally odd, since I think that even he realizes that we have skills with computers that he lacks himself. He couldn’t even figure out how to turn on the wireless card in the computer!

But, I digress.

In about an hour of looking around our relatively small city, we found about 160 access points (this isn’t using any special parts either, this is a stock Centrino laptop, with us just driving down streets more or less at random). We figure around 40% were using some sort of encryption. I had Andrew save the log, and I’ll try and get it from him soon so I can post it here.

I found the whole thing rather fascinating. I’ve been wanting to do it for some time now, and I rather appreciated the opportunity. It seems, however, that Jordan and Andrew merely tolerated the whole thing. I don’t know, I somehow find the idea of being able to have things pop up on your screen that are physical objects in people’s houses kind of cool. It’s like doing a giant survey, of sorts, except people can’t lie to you like people always do when approached by people with clipboards. Frankly, I’m surprised we found so many! Wireless technology is much more pervasive then I had though!

At the very least, Andrew now knows how to work his wireless features of his laptop much better then before, and I think that’s why he tolerated it. It’s not like I had to twist anyone’s arms to do it. I think a change to our routine every once in a while can’t be a bad thing. I think that Jordan didn’t like missing the opportunity to talk to Andrew about how we feel about the touching at the table (if you really don’t know, Jordan talks about it in his blog at times, link is as always over there ———> ). I don’t think we really lost that opportunity, I mean, would we really want to bring this up in front of Stu? I’m not sure when is a good time to really broach the subject, but somehow playing video games with Stu doesn’t exactly seem like the perfect moment.

When I get me laptop, I’m goin’ Wardriving!

EDIT: Wardriving log file! It can be opened with the newest version of Netstumbler. The log file is here.