[GRLUG] MIFI Choices

[Mike Williams]

I haven't heard anything about it in a while, but there was a proposed 
"Internet Safety Act" a couple of years ago that would require anyone 
that offers public Internet access has to keep two years of logs that 
could be used to identify the person behind a temporary IP address. This 
is a ridiculous amount of record-keeping for a small organization and 
would make Comcast's proposal completely impractical. Unless they're 
monitoring and recording everything at their end, which is an even more 
disturbing prospect!

Honestly, I don't see what it would accomplish anyway. Unless you 
require everyone to log in with a unique certificate, the most you're 
going to get is a wireless MAC address, and those can easily be faked.

Wireshark depends a bit on the encryption used. With anything less than 
WPA2 it behaves as you described, and two computers connected to the 
same access point with the same password can "see" each other's traffic. 
If you use WPA2, even with a known initial passcode, the encryption keys 
negotiated for each connection are unique. You can still, in theory, 
reverse the initial conversation and get the key, but it's much harder.

On 05/25/2011 04:53 PM, Topher wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2011, Michael Mol wrote:
>
>>> That's awesome, is it real?
>>>
>>> Maybe when I share it out I should hand out little cards explaining 
>>> about open traffic.
>>
>> I made that up off the top of my head. I know folks who'd do that 
>> kind of thing, though.
>
> I'm sure.  When I taught a college course I would run wireshark for a 
> bit on the first night of class, and then put the monitor on the big 
> screen and point out that I could see everything they were doing online.
>
> It made them pay a lot better attention during the rest of the 
> semester. I think all teachers should know how to run wireshark.
>
> topher
>


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