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September 12, 2008

Wee-Fi: Routing Out an Address; Badger-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

Slashdot breathlessly posts an item by coderrr that Skyhook Wireless is exposing people’s addresses: Yeah, whatever. Skyhook has accidentally offered an API that lets you query their Wi-Fi positioning system for latitude and longitude using a MAC address. Skyhook constantly drives major cities around the world and integrates scans created by users of their systems as well. The poster defines a non-existent problem: first, a scammer needs to get someone’s MAC address; then you need to pair a rough lat/long with their street address; then, coderrr says, you’d get a phishing email with your home address. Whatever. If my machine is compromised enough that you can obtain my MAC address and then launch a phishing attack, I have worse problems already than my street address being in the email—which is unlikely given that most Wi-Fi scans will be in urban areas. It’s likely Skyhook will modify their systems to prevent submission of such queries, or perhaps open their API further.

Madison Wi-Fi network sold to Atlanta firm: Xiocom purchases Mad City Broadband, a firm that has suffered significant criticism over the performance of its Wi-Fi network in Madison, Wisc. The press release from Xiocom (some quoted in the Badger Herald article) are a bit over the top about a network that reportedly has few users, inconsistent performance, and covers only a fraction of the city.

Posted by Glennf at September 12, 2008 11:34 AM

Categories: Wee-Fi

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