Wifi

[christo930]

While many people are excited about wifi in general and on the Pandora specifically, I have always had privacy concerns. One problem is that most openly accessible wifi hotspots don't use any sort of encryption and unless the website is using encryption it could put your passwords and user ID's at risk. A bigger concern is real world tracking. Is there any confirmed reports of a wifi enabled device being used to track somebody's movements or placing them at the scene of a crime? I know of several cases where gps data was used for tracking and placing someone at the scene of a crime at a certain time/date and wifi is certainly capable of doing so through your mac address and the logs on the router (access point). I'm not so much worried about being placed at a crime scene, so much as being tracked (leaving an electronic trail). Any confirmed reports? Especially from psp's.

Chris

 

[Tor]

Personally I'm not concerned about tracking. It would be difficult to do in practice - they would have to either follow you, quite close, which means that it doesn't matter if you're using wi-fi or not, or they would have to have access to every wi-fi AP you're using (to see the mac address of your device), which is pretty unlikely.

As for open vs. encrypted access points: This encryption is _NOT_ there to protect your data, it's to protect the access point. If the web page you're accessing isn't encrypted then you should never enter your name and password, period. Otherwise the guy with the AP (say, the pub owner) has access to all your data: There's no encryption between that router and the internet.

 

[Pickle]

I know of several cases where gps data was used for tracking and placing someone at the scene of a crime

Just leave your pandora at home when you decide to hold up starbucks

 

[VRAndy]

While many people are excited about wifi in general and on the Pandora specifically, I have always had privacy concerns. One problem is that most openly accessible wifi hotspots don't use any sort of encryption and unless the website is using encryption it could put your passwords and user ID's at risk.

Seems to me like most places with WiFi also have security cameras. So if they suspected you of robbing the place, they'd check those first, instead of trying to get logs from (for instance) your email server, then see if you used an IP assigned to the Starbucks you just robbed.

I suppose a more pressing concern is if you were on the lam, they could locate you by figuring out what IP you use to check your email and work backwards from there. This is a risk regardless of what ISP you're connected to. At least connecting from an internet cafe would slow them down. For this, best to use an anonomizer like TOR or something.


What I worry most about on open wifi :
- Packet sniffers.
- Man in the Middle attacks. (Who runs the access point, and are you really connecting to the one you think you are?)

Man in the middle wifi attacks seem like they could be particularly devious, but I've never really heard of them used in this capacity as anything other than cheap pranks.

But I don't worry much. If someone wants to go through all that trouble to steal my Wikipedia password they're welcome to it. I'll just make a new account. I do my banking on my home network.

Personally I'm not concerned about tracking. It would be difficult to do in practice - they would have to either follow you, quite close, which means that it doesn't matter if you're using wi-fi or not, or they would have to have access to every wi-fi AP you're using (to see the mac address of your device), which is pretty unlikely.

You've got it backwards. Imagine you made a post to this forum about how you were planning on assassinating some important politician. The secret service could get your IP from the gp32x.de moderators, then find the internet cafe the IP came from, and check the security cameras for that day and time.

Or, worse, what if one of the gp32x.de moderators wanted to stalk you for some crazy reason. They could theoretically plot on a map all the times and places you made a post. (Or even read the forums, if they were clever enough about it.) If you were trying to hide, or if one of those places was a 24hour gay porn emporium, then you can see how that might be less than ideal.

Again, if you're worried about being tracked, you've got to do your web surfing through an anonomizer. Even on a wired network.

 

[Klepto]

Funnily enough, with all the surveillance and tracking in the UK I was planning to use wifi to browse anonymously and to post politically sensitive comments.

 

[Tor]

Man in the middle wifi attacks seem like they could be particularly devious, but I've never really heard of them used in this capacity as anything other than cheap pranks.

There have been a few cases of spoofers in airports. Someone sets up a local AP on their laptop with an SSID indicating that it's an airport hotspot, with the usual pay-as-you-go through CC login page. Then they collect CC numbers from lots of people and run with them. There are other man-in-the-middle attacks that can also be set up this way.

QUOTE

Personally I'm not concerned about tracking. It would be difficult to do in practice - they would have to either follow you, quite close, which means that it doesn't matter if you're using wi-fi or not, or they would have to have access to every wi-fi AP you're using (to see the mac address of your device), which is pretty unlikely.

You've got it backwards. Imagine you made a post to this forum about how you were planning on assassinating some important politician. The secret service could get your IP from the gp32x.de moderators, then find the internet cafe the IP came from, and check the security cameras for that day and time.

Actually, if I did that, I think it's fine that they would track me down that way.. it's the right thing to do. I would hope they collected me and got me into some hospital for the mentally ill, and not Guantanamo..

QUOTE

Or, worse, what if one of the gp32x.de moderators wanted to stalk you for some crazy reason. They could theoretically plot on a map all the times and places you made a post. (Or even read the forums, if they were clever enough about it.) If you were trying to hide, or if one of those places was a 24hour gay porn emporium, then you can see how that might be less than ideal.

Well, when visiting sites where I don't trust the moderators I connect through an onion network.

QUOTE

Again, if you're worried about being tracked, you've got to do your web surfing through an anonomizer. Even on a wired network.

Exactly.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I'm sure some sort of ssh tunneling to a trusted server would be easy enough to implement on Pandora.