The dawn of the internet era has seen more and more people jump on to the internet bandwagon and spend a significant part of their free as well as work time online. Each day we find different ways in which we can make use of the Internet and slowly but surely, the world wide web is getting more and more ingrained in our daily lives. And as with any popular medium, we find energy being dissipated in various quarters in getting free access to it by taking advantage of the loopholes found in the technology being used.
Doug has an interesting article where he describes how to use ICMP tunneling to get access to your neighbours internet connection.
ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol which is used to carry the information about the status of the network. It has a wide variety of uses such as reporting on the availability of remote hosts, the errors in the underlying network and detecting network congestion. 'ping' - one of the most common programs which is used to test the network connectivity of up to three layers of OSI model uses ICMP to do its task.
And on a different note, Karl Bitz explains how to crack WEP using a machine running Ubuntu. The usual assumptions in both cases being that you as well as the neighbour in question rely on wireless technology to connect to the internet.
On a personal note, I do not support illegal ways of gaining things. In fact one very strong motivating factor for me to embrace GNU/Linux was the freedom from being dependent on (often pirated) proprietary software. But from a theoretical point of view, both the articles are interesting because they throw a wee bit more light on the technologies underlying the wireless internet access.
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