[AusNOG] Wifi Security and Interception

[Andrew Fort]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:15 PM, David Connors <david at codify.com> wrote:

> Meanwhile, Conroy births another half-a-dozen kittens carrying on about how
> Google *deliberately wrote* software to collect all of this data. "Eric
> Schmidt says Google loves cash!!", and other non sequiturs he barks at the
> Senate, as if to show the horrid depths of their packet snaffling depravity.
> Sheesh. Give me a break and get out your Occam's razor. The most likely
> scenario is that some poor sod at Google uses tcpdump or knocks up something
> using libpcap and runs it on 11-13 radio interfaces in promiscuous mode and
> collects a heap of stuff driving 'round (hard disks are cheap compared to
> drive around the world AGAIN if you didn't get all the data you need).  The
> intention would be to analyse it later to generate the necessary data to
> support W3C location support back in the office. Network engineers do
> promiscuous packet captures all the time. Grab all the data - more the

Yeah, it took them so long to notice presumably because:

* The volume of data being captured by the cameras is pretty vast, and
makes the unnecessary data they captured seem microscopic in
comparison.

* Network (operations) people were likely not involved at all (it was
a software engineer's project, and we know what their understanding of
networks are generally like. Employee-at-Google doesn't mean "smarter"
or "better", it just means you passed a bunch of pointless interview
questions that couldn't possibly work out whether you could actually
get-anything-done).

-a