

A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students - jesstess
http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/05/the-wireless-traffic-of-mit-students/

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epochwolf
I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually
realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.

~~~
kinghajj
What's the difference between taking a picture in a public place (a.k.a.
measuring the photons of the wavelength of visible light) and sniffing Wi-Fi
signals (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of radio)? Public
photons are public photons, it seems arbitrary to distinguish them based on
wavelength. How can it be a crime to measure the photons passing all around
us, sometimes literally _through_ us? The originators of these photons are
knowingly sending them into the public, so they should have no expectation of
privacy, just as we have no expectation of privacy for the photons that
reflect off us into someone's camera on the street.

~~~
alextgordon
The difference is humans can _see_ the visual spectrum but not the radio
spectrum. This means that people tend to ensure their own privacy in the
visual spectrum (by wearing clothes, etc), but don't in the radio spectrum (by
transferring sensitive data unencrypted).

You could argue that people are being irresponsible by not paying more
attention to their "radio privacy" (and you'd be right), however the lawmakers
apparently felt that the advantages of making it illegal outweighed the
disadvantages.

~~~
Periodic
If I recall, and I'm not a lawyer, a large part of privacy law is asking
whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Not many people go
around sniffing the wireless, you can reasonably assume that no one is
listening at a given moment. Visible light in public are being sampled all the
time by many observers.

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NathanKP
I'm surprised that none of the students tried to skew the results as the
author expected. If could have been done fairly easily by writing a quick HTML
page that uses JavaScript to make a couple iframes continuously load a variety
of different sites.

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vault_
It's not even that hard:

    
    
        while [ true ]; do
            curl www.google.com
        done

~~~
ghshephard
Or, my preferred approach:

    
    
       while :; do curl www.google.com; done

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unwind
I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using
encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more
difficult.

Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?

~~~
eob
As far as I know, yes, it is by design.

MIT's philosophy toward just about everything is famously open.

\- You can walk around in just about all of the buildings during the day, and
many even at night without a special access card.

\- A CS professor here was the one who founded OpenCourseWare, which helped
ignite the fire that led to many universities putting their courseware up for
free online)

\- Course registration is amazingly relaxed, to the point where halfway
through the semester it is common to hear a professor say "by the way, if you
haven't signed up for this course, you probably need to as the deadline is
approaching"

\- MIT's network is not behind a NAT box.

In terms of internet access, this culture means that anyone within radio-range
of MIT's campus gets free, unprotected WiFi. A very different reception than
you get at that other school down the street _cough_. :)

(Of course, the flip side of this is that you are responsible for your own
security).

EDIT: I also remember during grad student orientation, the campus police
representative explicitly told the auditorium full of new students: "The
Cambridge homeless community is part of the MIT community, too. Just because
you don't have a home doesn't mean you are not welcome here, so if you see
someone who appears homeless on MIT campus, treat them with the respect they
deserve." Approximate quote, since this was 2 years ago, but I was pretty
blown away at the culture here from day 1.

~~~
icefox
Last year while at the library there was a room to a lab (where the printers
were). To get in you could either punch in the code or next to it was a
whiteboard with 5 or so problems each of which gave you one digit in the code.

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phreanix
Somewhat funny quote: "Alas, pretty boring."

~~~
daten
I thought it sums up the article pretty well. I was expecting much more based
on the title.

A better title: "Amateur high-level wireless traffic analysis of 21 consenting
students during a 45 minute class"

~~~
kevindication
You could have rewritten this article without the word wireless. It's only
relevant because he didn't have to deal with a switched network.

No wireless packet analysis at all? Weak.

~~~
zwieback
she

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lazyant
30% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I wondered about that too. Not the case on my wired network. Perhaps its
because many laptops were taken out of suspend and then hardly used, so
session-initialization messages dominate. btw Thanks for actually addressing
the point of the article.

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squidsoup
I'd be concerned for the students that managed to push mmo-champion.com (a WoW
blog) to 9th place!

