Number 229 - June 2002

High Wireless Acts
By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post Staff, April 2002
"'WiFi' Lets Computer Users Stay Plugged In Without the Plug"     Donna Gallagher's sitting in the sunroom with her laptop computer, clicking away on the eBay auction site. She drifts into the bedroom, still clicking and bidding. Whoops -- now it's the bathroom -- but that Prada bag isn't going to get away from her.     That's the scene as Gallagher, administrative assistant to a roofing contractor, paints it. Her wireless connection to the Internet has made her something of an online auction addict, sometimes spending three or more hours at night in her Wilmington, N.C., home bidding on fashion and beauty items she'd otherwise have to drive a hundred miles to buy.     "You just don't know," said Gallagher of her addiction to wireless eBay. "It's dangerous." In the next breath she confesses she wants a "super-duper laptop" that will make bidding in bed even easier.     About 2,800 miles away, Linda Shukla is at the Bay Street Hair Salon in Fremont, Calif., waiting for her hair to perm. She used to sit there staring off into space. Now she plops her computer onto her smock-covered lap and logs onto the Web.     "I was just bored," said Shukla, a mother of two and a part-time program coordinator at the Dublin Theater in Dublin, Calif. While the other customers browse out-of-season fashion magazines, Shukla e-mails her family in India and colleagues, or listens to her favorite British classical music station over the Web.     In the same way that cordless phones and cell phones freed their users from the jack in the wall, WiFi (short for "wireless fidelity") makes it easier to fashion the Internet to one's lifestyle, rather than the other way around. It means surfing for recipes in the kitchen, or e-mailing the boss from the baby's nursery. And at the office, it means sharing files with co-workers, or being able to carry a PowerPoint presentation from conference room to conference room without having to reboot.     Going wireless means being able to use the Internet in more rooms of the house, and, therefore, in more aspects of one's life.     It beats hiring a contractor to puncture the walls to string cables and install outlets in every room of the house, to the tune of thousands of dollars. It's also superior to running long wires from the jack under the desk in the study to the dining room table -- only to trip and sever the connection in the mad dash to save a burning cake.     For Bob Fleck, the real advantage of the wireless connection is that he no longer has to stand in those long lines at business conferences where people are waiting to use the handful of computers available at the Internet kiosk.     "Now the trend is to set up a WiFi network so that everyone in the conference can use it all at once," said Fleck, an Ashburn resident who goes to technical-industry meetings several times a year. Broadening the Appeal     Until now, most WiFi users have been the Internet cognoscenti, an elite group of technologically savvy people who like to tinker with gadgets and love to access the Internet at lightning-fast speeds.     That's changing as more people flip open their laptops and get Web-connected -- for example, in the American Airlines Admiral's Club on Concourse D at Dulles International Airport.     Some airports themselves offer a constant signal, including San Jose International, Dallas Fort Worth and Norfolk International. Web-addicted frequent travelers know that many hotels -- including the Four Seasons in Georgetown, and some chains such as Holiday Inn and Marriott -- have wireless connections. American University plans to convert its entire campus telecommunications network to WiFi in time for the fall semester.     Even Starbucks is beaming WiFi connections in 530 of its stores, with plans to go wireless in 70 percent of its 3,200 North American shops -- a service it plans to start advertising in August.     The marriage of cafe and WiFi was a powerful one for Martha Donovan-Ammerman, who lives in Oakland, Calif., but spends a lot of her time in the Brewed Awakenings coffee shop in Berkeley.     "I used to be very anti-technology," Donovan-Ammerman said. "I thought it took jobs away from people like my mother, who lost her job at a candy factory because of machines," she said. But Brewed Awakenings's WiFi setup -- which she now uses -- has been the conversation starter that introduced her to at least 15 Internet aficionados, and those relationships have transformed her.     "I think it's the key to the world," she said.     The appeal of the technology for many is that it's cheap and easy to use. WiFi requires a small device -- called an access point -- mounted on a wall or a ceiling. Access points cost $125 to $500, and can convert any kind of high-speed service -- cable modem, digital subscriber line (DSL) or T-1 line -- into a wireless connection. Like garage-door systems, cordless phones and baby monitors, the airwaves they use aren't regulated by the government, and don't interfere with radio or television transmissions.     Receiving that signal requires a credit card-sized client card, which costs $80 to $100. The technology goes by several different brand names, including Apple AirPort, or by its technical name, 802.11b. Some of the newest laptops come with the card in place; most others require the additional purchase of the card, which slides into the side of the computer and can detect a signal from an access point up to 900 feet away.     "For people who have these $1,000 laptops now, it's like they have a Porsche and they're looking for an autobahn to run it on," said Rick Ehrlinspiel, an early convert to WiFi who installed it in his San Francisco-area home.     "Instead of reaching over for the phone book, you reach out and pull up the laptop," and that's true for maps and shopping catalogues too, he said. His initial love affair with WiFi has led to something more: Now the Internet entrepreneur is funneling funds from his first business, the political venture Runforoffice.com, to a new enterprise installing WiFi networks in cafes, hotels, bars and health clubs around the country.     Between 7.5 million and 8 million U.S. users have bought the equipment necessary to hook up to those wireless networks, and companies, municipal governments and individuals are embracing the new technology.     "Over the course of 2000 and 2001, WiFi has grown a lot . . . more so than any other wireless technology," said Gemma Paulo, an analyst for In-stat/MDR, a market-research firm. Last year, in the midst of the technology recession, WiFi hardware sales grew at about 14 percent a quarter, she said. Fights on the Home Front     Some people view WiFi as a kind of grass-roots political movement.     Don Bailey's philosophy is that Internet access should be fast, cheap, democratic and convenient. But in his town-house development near Sterling, none of that was true. After losing battles -- with Verizon Communications Inc. for a DSL line and Adelphia Communications Corp. for high-speed cable -- he decided to take his neighborhood's broadband matters into his own hands.     In March, he custom-ordered a $499-a-month super-high-speed connection -- a T-1 line -- with enough capacity to service a large office building. ("I was going to get a race car this year, but instead I got a high-speed connection," he said.)     Now, Bailey's like the enterprising kid with the lemonade stand on the corner, except that what he's offering is a new wireless Internet service beaming from his house for $50 a month, so far to five of his neighbors. Word of mouth has brought four or five more neighbors to Bailey's virtual door seeking to get in on the fun. He even offers free access -- about 30 minutes of Web-surfing time -- to anyone able to pick up his wireless signal within 100 yards of his house.	By installing these devices in their own homes and sharing high-speed connections with other users, residents living in or near technology centers such as San Francisco, New York and Washington are increasingly able to circumvent their cable and phone companies to get Internet access not only for themselves but also for their entire community.     Last year, Bruce Potter started Nova Wireless, with about 170 members who share a vision of an Internet network made up of communities using WiFi and opening up their networks to the public.     "My initial goal was free Internet access and open networks," said Potter, who runs two WiFi networks -- one inside his house, and one from his roof for the benefit of his neighbors. "It turns out people have trouble getting any kind of broadband," so this became a way to share a limited resource, he said.     One of the limiting factors of WiFi is the short distance the signal travels. Cellular companies -- which are developing a competing technology of their own -- now hope to profit from the growth in WiFi by developing a system that will allow customers to migrate from WiFi networks to their cellular networks without having to reconnect.     In some places, like Manhattan, WiFi has so proliferated that it's almost impossible to find an area that isn't within reach of someone's network, said Ed Skoudis, a vice president with Predictive Systems Inc., a network-management firm in New York. "I took a $20 cab ride around Manhattan and found 455 access points in an hour," Skoudis said.     That kind of availability makes virtual neighborhoods easy to create. People living in apartment buildings are setting up networks that are easy to share with neighbors living on the other side of a wall, much to the chagrin of Internet service providers concerned that multiple users are piggybacking on a single paid subscription, Skoudis said. 'Sniffing' for Security     At least a couple of times a week, Chris O'Ferrell dons his sunglasses, gets into his red Corvette (license plate CYBRWAR), turns up some head-banging rock a' la Ted Nugent, and reacquaints himself with a darker and more dangerous side of WiFi.     He hacks.     O'Ferrell, who specializes in breaking into bank networks, starts by going to www.netstumbler.com, a Web site that offers him the tools necessary to "sniff" the air for open WiFi networks. With his laptop on the passenger's seat, attached to a small antenna on the dashboard, he starts doing what's known underground as a "war drive," this time along Washington's K Street NW.     Ping, ping, ping.     The computer starts giving off sounds like a slot machine, bleeping more than 100 times as it detects the presence of WiFi access points along a few blocks in the heart of Washington's law firm district.     "DC Office" is the name of several WiFi networks that pop up on his screen. Others are labeled simply "wireless," or "tsunami," the generic name some access points call themselves when they're installed straight out of the box and no one has programmed them to make them secure. All of those networks are wide open, which means it takes less than two minutes for O'Ferrell to configure his client card to pick up the signal, then gain entry into DC Office's or Tsunami's internal system.     Ping, ping. The Senate office buildings, the Supreme Court and even the Pentagon. Even if they're encrypted, it would take an hour, "at the most," to hack in, he said.     His passenger changes the music. "I've never hacked to jazz before," he said.     As chief technology officer of Netsec Inc., a Herndon network-security firm, O'Ferrell actually puts his war drives to good use. His mission is to figure out a way that hackers won't be able to, for example, funnel $10 million out of your business's bank account -- which he was able to do to a major Wall Street bank once (it was a security project; he returned the money).     Of the WiFi users out there, "about 75 percent don't ever use encryption," O'Ferrell said. "That's really scary."     Security experts say it's easy to hack into almost any kind of network that runs on these wireless networks, both because the users are lax about security and because the systems themselves lack sophisticated protections to keep eavesdroppers out of the loop.     If an executive is using his laptop in his corner office and is linked to the company's WiFi connection, for example, a hacker sitting outside the building can burrow into the same signal to penetrate the system and look at the very same information.     It's even possible for a benign user to sit on a bench across from the Apple Computer store in the new shopping complex in Clarendon and surf the Web by riding the open signal from Apple's WiFi product display.     It's increasingly in vogue for criminally inclined teenagers to perpetrate a kind of cyber-vandalism, stealing Social Security numbers and credit card numbers, O'Ferrell said. They often turn around and exchange the information for computer games, he added.     The only really secure way to use the wireless network is to hook up to the Internet using a private network, said Dennis Eaton, chairman of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, an industry group based in San Jose. The problem is that most users don't bother to take the extra steps necessary to do that, he said.     Some businesses and government organizations are suspending their WiFi plans because of security concerns, said Chuck Riegel, chief operating officer of Ecutel Inc., an Alexandria-based firm making software that promises to make the systems more secure. Until better technology is available, WiFi won't take off on a grand scale in the business world, he said.     That hasn't been a deal breaker for the Henrico County, Va., school system.     Two kids tried to hack into their school's grading system, but that didn't dissuade the county from installing WiFi in its schools and providing each of its 11,500 high school students with a laptop last fall.     "Now I lecture from the back of the classroom," said Carole Givens, who spent most of her 34 teaching years at the front of the classroom, trying to get her U.S. history and government students to focus on a blackboard.     Ever since Varina High School installed WiFi connections in Givens's classroom, her students have been able to get assignments, diagrams, work sheets and activities through the Internet connection. Now class is interactive, and the laptops allow Givens to move around the room and give her students more personal attention.     Computer instruction the old way never worked, she said. "We have four computer labs, but of course that was never enough," because the students always wanted to use the labs at the same time. "Now, my classroom is always a lab."     Annandale resident Catherine Rotolo calls Apple AirPort her "magic bubble," a discreet little device she hides behind her entertainment system.     Two of those magic bubbles have transformed her home and her office into a seamless workplace. She can take care of business anywhere in the building where she works, which spans an entire city block. "If I wanted to, I could sit in the bathtub if I wasn't worried about getting electrocuted," she said.     Moreover, it's changed her idiosyncratic habits.     "I find myself waking up at midnight thinking about mistakes I might have made, or things I might have forgotten -- it's terrible," Rotolo said.     "I used to keep a notebook at my bedside, but now I just e-mail myself."
Number 229 - June 2002