Where the real war seems to be

Let us begin with defining wardriving as "The benign act of locating and logging wireless access points while in motion." We shall not be using analogies since there are none that fit wardriving as it is defined. One would think that after reading this definition it would be simple enough to understand and leave alone... one would think....

Enter "The Media", also known as journalists, freelance reporters, and again also known as people that shovel shit to the sheeple of the world. If you aren't familiar with the term "sheeple, " please allow me to introduce you to it now. Sheeple are people that have the minds of sheep. They follow the herd, the popular vote either not to be confrontational, or because they simply have not the ability to think for themselves. Well perhaps they may be able to think for themselves, but they hide it deep inside because they are afraid of being different, and thus merge with the rest of the herd quietly and meekly. Of course this is no benefit to anyone since they just become a shit-machine that propagates and creates more shit. All right, now that we are clear what sheeple are let us proceed into defining the media. The media is "supposed" to explain to the common people (i.e. the sheeple) what is going on in the world from an objective perspective. Don't start laughing because that is really what they are supposed to be doing. In the real world though, facts don't generate dollars, and therefore weighted words must be used and abused. Remember, if it bleeds, it leads!

The media has come to an understanding that wardrivers are really folks interested in the wireless aspect of networking, though who wants to hear about folks interested in the wireless aspect of networking? Well, for one I do, but I am a wardriver! But most of the population have yet to hear about wireless networking, those that do may or may not find interest in it, and even then may just see it as a tool like a shovel or a broomstick and nothing more. This gives the media an opportunity to exploit the common folk (also known as the non-technical folks mixed in with sheeple) without out the common folk realizing it. If it is written is must be true right? Well, not all the time and there are varying degrees. Remember truth is merely a perception of a fact, and sometimes perceptions can be quite twisted and easily twisted again. Money is a good motivator, and a good twister. Since technically inept folks plus technology equals mystery the media can create illusions that seem ever so real to those whom do not understand the same magic tricks. This is frankly why you and I have seen so many bogus articles on wardriving, and why the media keeps getting away with throwing out these wildcards from the planet Bogotron.

You may be saying to yourself that "Well, that is just the way of the world, " and let it go. Well just to comfort you it isn't going to be let go. No, not as long as wardrivers are getting hassled for no reason other than being devote in something they find interesting. Freedom is not free, nor is it supposed to be otherwise everything would be free. Let us jump into the fire...

Most articles written in the past that are simply disgusting to read include a few common items among themselves, and here they are:

1. Hackers are wardrivers and wardrivers are hackers, in fact they are used interchangeably throughout writings.

2. Wardrivers are armed with laptops and a potato chip can spreading viruses and spam from hundreds of miles away taking down power grids, reading email, allowing terrorism to proliferate through these anonymous connections.

3. Wardrivers are a rogue band of whiz-kid geeks who are so pasty and either super fat or super thin looking for the perfect virtual female to call their own.

4. Wardriving exposes critical infrastructure weaknesses opening an excuse for a terrorist to do some jihad style wardriving causing the world to shut down and everyone kill each other and themselves in the confusion.

5. Wardriving is evil and a toy of Satan bringing all wardrivers to be demons from hell to serve in the afterlife as beacons of lies.

6. Wardrivers practice annual bouts of mass orgies involving drive-by wifi.

Are you laughing yet? Sure it is some pretty scary shit. But it is out there, exaggerated or not it exists in the minds of people who may see someone driving around their neighborhood with any type of antenna on their vehicle or some weird looking kid laughing at his laptop. It appears that appearances still matter in this somehow and give a false representation that all weirdoes have purple and pink Mohawks and a face full of body-piercings and wear all black and can take down a power grid by whistling a short little tune over any telephone line. Hollywood sure hasn't helped with the portrayal of hackers - no we aren't going into the bogus classes of hackers (i.e. crackers, jackers, nackers, rackers, blackers, tackers... what the fuck ever). For some reason the media has gotten the closet thing they can think of that uses a computer and thrown in a few criminal elements (all that black clothing with the western cowboy idea that bad guys wear black?) and voila you have a hacker, and all of a sudden you have a wardriver... oh and of course it works both ways in the eyes of the media. Anyone interested in hobbies or professional security all of sudden is clumped up into something tasty for the media to sell, the people to fear and to enrage the clump-ees.

How about online database mapping systems? Tools of the terrorists, spammers, and h4X0rz you have been told to believe by the media? Sure, and the FBI, and the rest of the TLA just lets them continue on... Sure... you know if something really were "illegal, unlawful" such sites wouldn't exist. You have heard of when something actually does hit the fan sites are usually taken down in a matter of minutes... though this is usually because some politician's daughter was in a video, or someone with mega-dollars can push the right buttons and *poof* all of a sudden someone cares, passes a bill and it is illegal and done with. Why hasn't that happen to wardriving? Will it ever happen? No, of course it won't, why? WARDRIVING IS NOT A CRIME. It never has been, and never will be. If it was a crime I know a lot of people I'd be sitting in geek-population in cellblock WIFI with. Wardriving doesn't violate anyone's rights, anyone's ethics, anyone's religion... nothing. Yet the media persists to add mystery to this benign practice, hobby, profession, whatever you wish to think of it as.

Headlines: Mysterious dark hacker underground geek whiz kid Cam L Toe, more known as CLT among his pasty keyboard-cowboy laptop carrying Wi-Fi freaks of nature, has been arrested and is awaiting trial for hacking his way into Bogotronica Inc - A company dealing with virtual used panties from online avatars and stealing billions of credit card numbers and social security numbers after watching the movie "Hacking For Love" - A Love story based on a freaky-geeky-cheeky undersexed super pasty fat boy who can't hold liquor to save his life that falls in love with a hot Malibu model after meeting online

You again are probably laughing, it seems that the media is more a toy of amusement than the useful tool they are supposed to be. Speaking of tools there are a lot of them out there in the guise of reporters and journalists. How about those investigative reporters that find some kid off AOL and have him show the ways of the underground and trickle through badly configured machines throwing ones and zeros across the screen to the audience and making the pop-hiss of an analog modem... all trying to glaze the audience with high-tech FUD. So many examples exist it is frightening. Can all this be running through the mind of the media? No of course not, they would go insane. But they do create this "alleged" world for the sheeple, and believe it or not they buy it. And who says everyone has the right to vote? I certainly don't want to have a million potato heads vote for the person they think is going to win. Neither should you.

Wardriving is not a crime, being stupid should be.

Wake up America, the media has you by the balls or labials or whatever you have down there. When you see something that smells fishy do not be afraid to call or email the publisher, editor, reporter (hell why not just everyone) and let them know the error in their ways. They may claim they had nothing to do with it, that it was all from "the top" that caused these mutant-like changes. All excuses for not being responsible for what they spread. Contact them, show them what is fact, spreading fact is good. At least people can decide and judge for themselves and cannot blame the media for poisoning their minds. Sure it may be a shock at first, but you know what it sure feels better to think for yourself.

The media claims that they are pressured to produce something viable in short order and basically have to pull a rabbit out of their ass to keep their jobs. This causes them to make up shit instead of quality reporting and people buy it, both literally and figuratively. Question what you read, research it yourself. Do not go on spreading the poison. If you feel the media is wrong share your thoughts, some may listen, some would love to have help from someone in the know, be it wardriving, growing roses, counting backwards. For some reason the media and their time-tables don't allow for proper research and the article always end up being more creating writing than objective reporting. If they had someone to call and verify information that would certainly help them, but the chain trickles with little lies that snowball into monoliths of "maybes" and "sures." This in turns somehow gets stamped into concrete and thus out of the magic kettle comes a creature that could not exist in the real world.

Wardriving is not bad. Hacking is not bad. Believe it. The word for people that get caught stealing information, data, connections, are the same type of people that get caught stealing money, cars, jewelry: CRIMINALS. Sure something may have started as a wardriving project, or hacking project but the second the individual or group crosses the line they are then leaving benign interests behind and no longer are wardriving, or hacking... they are now acting as a criminal. You cannot blame hacking for someone exploiting a network and shutting it down. You certainly can't call it wardriving just because this happened over a wireless connection. Certainly the media would like you to believe you can call it wardriving and hacking. All very wrong in the sense that wardriving and hacking are fundamentally good for the world in that without it technology would be sucking very hard right now if it wasn't for such minds that evolved the world into what it is today.

Let's shed light on hacking, which is used by the media interchangeably with wardriving (which it should not be). Hacking can be considered a superset of things that involve thinking. Regardless of it being related to computer use, or anything else. Wardriving can be a subset of this superset, but at the same time can be completely independent. Wardriving really requires no skill. You can slap a laptop with a wifi card if it isn't already built in download someone's software and click the start button and voila you are wardriving. Hacking isn't that easy and thus why such distance is needed. Hackers can wardrive, but wardrivers can't necessarily hack. That is a fact... so why does the media use them as if they were the same? Maybe they don't know? Maybe they want to portray wardrivers with the bad rap that hackers have gotten all these years to show they are in the same league? Maybe. Who really fucking cares, they need to stop this bullshit because it simply isn't true at all.

Now let's talk about the darker flavors in life. Hackers see themselves as good, then there are those who think they are some type of Mafioso-bad-boy-rebel who can make bad things happen to people that make of them and once they find a way they use it destructively continually. Life isn't this black and white, but the media would love you to believe it is. Anyway to Hackers, these types of people are labeled as script kiddies, people who just use other people's research and work meant for good to do bad and lame things. They want to call themselves hackers too but have very poor skill sets and often just hide in the background and fling peanuts and poo to the world from their dark corners. They are monkeys who just act mechanically out of immaturity than anything else. They can range from any age but inside they aren't growing up... usually until they do some prison time. There is always an ongoing "war" with hackers and script kiddies and that will happen until the end of time, there is nothing the public trust can do about that... think of it as an internal conflict between genetic offsets. Some monkeys evolve and others don't. Anyway such as there are these varieties in hackerdom there are similar varieties in the wardriving community. The community being people whom call themselves wardrivers. Except those that do such bad things as logon to connections without prior permission or extort people, steal data, cause problems aren't wardrivers, and wardrivers hate them to the core. These are plain troublemakers that have a chance of joining the criminal society. They out rightly advocate the theft of services saying that the sheep don't care and that they will continue to do so until time ends. These aren't wardrivers. These aren't wardrivers. These aren't wardrivers. Hopefully that makes sense to you. Just because you say you are something doesn't mean you are, and actions speak louder than words.

And back to the media. Hopefully someone from the media will read this and start to think to him or herself, and hopefully it will make their lives a lot better if they adapt and go back to their roots of giving facts back to the people. You don't need to sound like Darwing Duck with well-placed words that rhyme and syncopate only to end up sounding like a bad ad, or poet. If you want to do that involve yourself around poetry and creative writing and stop trying to give news to people that is skewed by your perceptions of guilt. Raise the bar for yourselves and do something better for the world, otherwise feel my claws rip the fat from your loins.

And finally back to the reader and excluding the media. People, think for yourselves, research what you read and be yourself. You don't need to jump into the popular vote only to convince yourself everyone is right. The media is out to take your dollars by selling you whatever you want to believe. Make them earn it... and wardriving is not a crime.

Your buddy and pal, blackwave

CONTACT:

blackwave
blackwave@hushmail.com
http://www.blackwave.org
http://www.irvineunderground.org/blackwave/

URLS:

http://www.wardriving.com
http://www.wardrivingisnotacrime.com
http://www.worldwidewardrive.org
http://www.wigle.net
http://www.allyour80211barebelongtous.org
http://www.netstumbler.com
http://www.renderlab.net/projects/wardrive
http://home.comcast.net/~jaydeboer
http://www.churchofwifi.com
https://mailsrv.dis.org/mailman/listinfo/wardriving
http://www.agentgreen.org/projects/netstumbler
http://www.duntemann.com/wifi/wardrivingfaq.htm
http://www.sonar-security.com
http://www.blackthornsystems.com
http://www.michiganwireless.org

How to become a Hacker

Looking for advice on learning to crack passwords, sabotage systems, mangle websites, write viruses, and plant Trojan horses? You came to the wrong place. I'm not that kind of hacker.

Looking for advice on how to learn the guts and bowels of a system or network, get inside it, and become a real expert? Maybe I can help there. How you use this knowledge is up to you. I hope you'll use it to contribute to computer science and hacking (in its good sense), not to become a cracker or vandal.

This little essay is basically the answers to all the emails I get asking how to become a hacker. It's not a tutorial in and of itself. It's certainly not a guaranteed success. Just give it a try and see what happens. If this ends up being of any use to you, let me know. That said, here's where to start:

Take things apart. Look under the hood. Dig through your system directories and see what's in there. View the files with hex editors. Look inside your computer. Wander around computer stores and look at what's there.

If you can afford it, buy lots of books. If you can't, spend time in libraries and online. Borrow books from friends. Go through tutorials. Read the help files on your system. If you're using Unix/Linux, read the man files. Check out the local college bookstores and libraries. And as you're reading, try things (see next paragraph).

Don't be afraid to change things, just to see what'll happen. Do this long enough, of course, and you'll wipe out your system (see next paragraph), but that's part of becoming a hacker. Try command options and switches you've never tried before. Look for option menus on programs and see what they can do. In Windows, tweak your registry and see what happens. Change settings in .INI files. In Unix, dig around in the directories where you don't normally go. On the Macintosh, play around in the system folder.

If you start mucking around with system files, registries, password files, and such, you will eventually destroy your system. Have a backup ready. If you can afford it, have a system you use just for experimenting, ready to reload on a moment's notice, and do your serious work (or serious gaming!) on a different computer.

Who says a computer or network is the only place to hack? Take apart your telephone. Figure out your television (careful of the high voltage around the picture tube - if you fry yourself, it's not my fault) and VCR. Figure out how closed captioning works (that was a plug for my CaptionCentral.com Web site). Take apart your printer. Pick up the latest issues of Nuts & Volts and Midnight Engineer (you’ve obviously made a good start if you’re reading Blacklisted! 411). Take apart the locks on your doors. Figure out how your radio works. Be insatiably curious and read voraciously. There are groups you can learn from. There are whole Web sites devoted to hacking TiVo units, for example.

You can't cut a board in half with a screwdriver. Well, maybe you can, but it'll take a long time. Dig around and find the proper tools for the operating systems you're using. They're out there on the Web. You can get some pretty good stuff as shareware or freeware (especially on Linux). The serious power tools often cost serious money. What kinds of tools? Hex file editors. Snoopers that analyze system messages and network traffic. Compilers and APIs for programming. Scripting tools. Disk editors/formatters. Disassemblers. When you get good, write some of your own.

If you want to be a hacker, you're going to have to learn to program. The easiest way to start depends on the operating system you're using. The choice of language is very individual. It's almost a religious thing. Suggest a programming language to a beginner, and someone will disagree. Heck, you'll probably get flamed for it in a newsgroup. In Unix, I'd suggest getting started with Perl. Buy a copy of the camel book (Programming Perl) and the llama book (Learning Perl). You'll have the fundamentals of programming really fast! The best part is that the language itself is free. In Windows, you can get started quickly using a visual development environment like Visual Basic or Java. No matter what the system, if you want to get serious, you'll eventually need to learn C (or C++ or C# or some other variant). Real hackers know more than one programming language, anyway, because no one language is right for every task.

Hackers spend a lot of time at their keyboards. I type 90+ wpm (according to the Mavis Beacon typing tutor). HackingWiz (of hackers.com and Hacker's Haven BBS fame) says he can type 140+ wpm. The typing tutor may be boring, but it pays off.

Windows 95/98/Me is a shell on top of a 32-bit patch to a 16-bit DOS. Get some real operating systems (Linux, Windows NT, Mac OS, OS/2...) and learn them. You can't call yourself a linguist if you only know one language, and you certainly can't call yourself a hacker if you only know one OS. Linux is a hacker's dream. All the source code is freely available. Play with it, analyze it, learn it. Eventually, perhaps you can make a contribution to Linux yourself. Who knows, you might even have a chance to write your own OS.

It's hard to learn in a vacuum. Take classes. Join users groups or computer clubs. Talk to people on IRC or newsgroups or Web boards until you find people to learn with. That can take a while. Every third message on newsgroups like alt.hack* is "teach me to hack." Sigh. The best way to be accepted in any group is to contribute something. Share what you learn, and others will share with you.

It's important to pick some projects and work until you've finished them. Learning comes from doing, and you must follow the project through start to finish to really understand it. Start really simple. Make an icon. Customize your system (the startup screen on Win95, or the prompt on Unix). Make a script that performs some common operation. Write a program that manipulates a file (try encrypting something).

Start with the Web. Read the help for the search engines. Learn how to use Boolean searches. Build up an awesome set of bookmarks. Then move on to other Internet resources. Get on Usenet. Find some underground BBSs. Get on IRC. You'll find useful information in the strangest places. Get to the point where you can answer your own questions. It's a whole lot faster than plastering them all over various newsgroups and waiting for a serious answer.

Once you've gone through these steps, go out and contribute something. The Internet was built by hackers. Linux was built by hackers. Usenet was built by hackers. Sendmail was built by hackers. Be one of the hackers that builds something.