What then is all this WarWalking, WarDriving, WarChalking and so on? In particular, why the aggressive War-word in them ? From what I learned, the historical origin of these terms comes from the 1983 movie “War Games” in which a kid sets up his modem to dial numbers until it finds a computer to hack leading inevitably to the US-army in total panic. This hobby created the phrase WarDialing. In analogy, a person driving around in a car with a laptop in search for wireless networks is said to be WarDriving, if (s)he is on foot it is clearly WarWalking. Because of the aggressive nature of the War-subword some people have re-engineered an explanation :

WAR = Wireless Access Reconnaissance

so let us hope this acronym will catch on. Now then, what is WarChalking ? It was invented by Matt Jones and the idea is that a WarWalker should write a symbol in chalk on the wall nearest to the discovered Access Point describing its nature (see picture on the left) : the first sign depicts an open node, the next a closed one and the last one is a node with WEP-protection (btw. WEP=Wired Equivalent Privacy). A lot of people seem to take this fairly serious, there is even a webpage warchalking.org devoted to it on which you can find a lot more information. And as warchalking was originally British, there had to be also an American site containing among other things a not that active forum. Further, the unofficial HOW-TO of WarDriving may be interesting. To me it all sounds as an excuse to buy a GPS-receiver and a laptop…

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Posted in mac
Written on Fri, 09 January 2004 at 6:55 pm
Tags: games, warwalking
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