War-Biking!

In 2000 or so, Pete Shipley (if I recall correctly) introduced the term "Wardriving" to a bunch of hackers -- some malicious, some benevolent -- at the DefCon convention in Las Vegas. While Wardriving sounds violent, it is not. It involves driving around with a wireless-enabled computer, looking for wireless networks in the wild. It usually does not involve actually connecting to them or anything illegal.

It wasn't long before people started counting how many new networks they could find. It became like a sport. I've been into it for quite a while, and now I've rigged my commuter bike with a Garmin eTrex Yellow GPS, a Senao Engenius 200mW wireless card, and a pair of magnetic-mount 9dB antennae for picking up more networks. At its core, my "War Biking" setup uses a Hewlett Packard Jornada 720 running HPC2000 -- a derivative of Windows CE, similar to Windows Mobile found on PDAs such as the Dell Axim and HP iPaqs. The package is rounded out by a software tool called "MiniStumbler" which simply takes note of all the networks that it sees, and records GPS coordinates so that you can go back and map exactly where they are.

Tomorrow should be a fun commute. Temps will be in the single digits, and I'll be trying out my new nerdy setup. I wonder what people will think of the antennae on the back of my bike... I'll post some maps of what I find.