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HighWLAN 139

Posted by michael from the road-trip dept.
Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"
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HighWLAN More

HighWLAN

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  • I wonder if it would work in the UK, without the other wireless and electrical gear by the motorways interfering with it?

    Escoutaire
  • Yet a li'l bit frightening when you consider the implications...
  • I didn't even notice that it was another ad [oreilly.com] from O'Reilly.

    I can't get enough of those stealth ads!
    • What, the fact that they publish interesting stories (some written by yours truly) and then have the temerity to link to books they sell...the whole article is thus an ad? Yeah, they sell a book on networking your car, using talkd, and driving to a perl conference...
      • It isn't the stories. It's the blatant advertising that goes on here at Slashdot for O'Reilly. These stories used to be posted by Lisa@oreilly.net, but now others have taken her place at posting these stories to /.

  • Employer paying? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chuq ( 8564 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:09AM (#4004130) Journal
    Very amusing.. I especially like the fact that one of the guys was required online by his employer, while on the trip. Does this mean he can write off all the costs etc to his employer and get them to pay for it all? Nice little scam!!

  • I was crying by the end of the first paragraph... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DrVxD ( 184537 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:14AM (#4004137) Homepage Journal
    "It was hard to tell but I think Emacs came out as the better utility vehicle."

    Absolutelty hilarious. I'll go and read the rest of it now...

  • News for Nerds. Stuff that matters? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Or a geek blog?

  • Thats old (Score:2, Interesting)

    by orki ( 598146 )
    http://review.lanwahn.at/php-cgi/gallery/view_albu m.php?set_albumName=autobahnwahn2002 here are some more pics from an highwaylan from austria (may not all of u understand german) but pictures say more than 1000words

  • Heh. (Score:4, Funny)

    by zapfie ( 560589 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:21AM (#4004150)
    Making a phone call from Pittsburgh to New York while both parties are coasting down I-70 in Illinois wasn't my idea of a smart move. I'd be more inclined to run into them to get their attention; it would have cost the same.

    I guess this falls under "Everything I needed to know about driving I learned from Gran Turismo"...
    • Or GTA3.
    • This was a clever solution for a group travelling together. Plus their employer probably footed the bill for the cell phone charges...

      But the main connection to the Internet was the phone and that is expensive in the U.S. If the prices were instead reasonable, they could have used GPRS or something similar. "yous" there on the East Coast could have a better cellphone pricing model [slashdot.org]. A commitment to standards and reasonable pricing for cell phones would be a boon for mobile computing in the U.S.

      • What are you talking about? My phone provides internet connectivity (albeit at a fairly slow rate - like all cell phones in this country that I know of) that just uses the normal minutes. I've got nation-wide use and free long-distance, too. All you'd have to do is get a plan with a lot of minutes, and you're set for not *that* much money. One machine, NAT, and a Nextel phone (or Sprint, IIRC) would be fine for traveling use. Maybe with some diald magic thrown into the mix, as the connect doesn't take terribly long to come up.
  • What with all the traffic jams? It would be nice to have an open network for everyone to access when they're standing still or for your companions. Heck, I'd love to see this for the kids. Finally you don't have to tell them to shut up... just tell 'em to go on the internet or IRC. ^_^

  • Best Part (Score:5, Funny)

    by inkfox ( 580440 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:24AM (#4004157) Homepage
    The best part: They all agreed that IRC was the ideal way to chat on the road... but nobody remembered to bring ircd.

    So they had ot use talkd! AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

    It's also amusing that they still bothered to use ssh between each other's machines. I say -- any cracker dude who figures out how to snoop on my 802.11b traffic at 85m/h deserves my respect and my passwords!

  • umm, yeah... (Score:5, Funny)

    by werd life ( 94886 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:29AM (#4004163)
    using a cell phone would be too expensive... .. and we used a cell phone to get online!!!

    • .. but he said that using a cell phone while going down I-70 wouldn't be a smart idea. He made it sound like it wasn't safe... but apparently using IRC while driving is...
    • This is a classic case of geek reasoning. Aything that prevents you from doing something cool receives a rating of [-5 illogical] until you've got the cool thing set up. Then it all has to be re-evaluated.

      <rationalizing>cellphones are too expensive, therefore we must set up a wireless network </rationalizing>
      [later]
      ok, the network is set up, and now getting on the net is the new cool goal, <rationalizing> hmmm, maybe cellphone calls aren't really that expensive </rationalizing>

      The sad thing is, I can look at soooo many times when I've done the same thing.
  • Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!

    They were lucky. Otherwise it would be intervehicle accidents and high speed metal warping at 65 mph.

  • Yet again.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by kingOFgEEEks ( 598145 ) <c.n.jackson@gmai l . c om> on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:31AM (#4004166) Journal
    ..the result of Geeks with too much money (or stuff), too much spare time, and some hare brained scheme that they will make work.

    god, it's beautiful.

  • Nationwide? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by skroz ( 7870 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:31AM (#4004167) Homepage
    I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.

    This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
    • Such system could also be used to resolve traffic jams and advice drivers to take alternate routes in case of accidents.

    • Re:Nationwide? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Mike McTernan ( 260224 )
      Actually, you could use frequency measurements (aka dopler) to determine if cars are moving towards or away from each other; GPS isn't needed.
      • Actually, you could use frequency measurements (aka dopler) to determine if cars are moving towards or away from each other; GPS isn't needed.
        Right, but wouldn't that set off everyone's radar detectors?
      • Interesting idea, though wouldn't the equipment to measure this be substantially more expensive than a GPS, or even a simple electronic compass?

        GPS data would also allow for constructing the network based on position as well as direction, allowing each node to locate the best choice for the next hop.

        • substantially more expensive than a GPS

          Not really - your GSM phone has to cope with the effect of travelling toward/away from a base station and will compensate when transmitting for this. It is practical and cheap.

          GPS data would also allow for constructing the network based on position as well as direction

          But would incur a penalty of needing some central server to process positions and generate routing information - quite impractical if the system is to scale to x million cars.

    • You can't use GPS data to decide how to form the network topology, because in order to echange the GPS data you will have to have the network already running.

      Unfortunately, the amount of routing information that needs to be exhanged in ad-hoc networks increases exponentially with the size of the network and the rate of change in the network topology (mobility).

      You're right in that utilizing location information could be used to optimize the routing protocol, and people are working on this, but it sill presents a formidable scalability problem.
      • True, but you wouldn't need to know the location of every node on the network... only those nodes involved in reaching the next fixed node, which could be placed every few (10? 20?) miles. A map of nodes geographically close is all that's necessary. You run into problems when you get into high traffic areas, so a system of choosing routes based on a minimum distance could be used.

      • You could use the SuperPeer concept from p2p software. Certain cars could auto-negotiate (sorry for the pun) to be the preferred paths for vehicles around them.

        Moving on, I couldn't guess at how you'd make it work, but you could have seamless hops, so you could produce wireless "conduits" out of a sequence of cars. When a car moved out of range or another was preferred, the "conduit" could change a node without interfering with the communications.

        A tree structure would probably work best here. Have the "trunk" nodes near physical access points, the "branches" move away from the trunks out into traffic, and the "leaf" nodes are the end communicators.

        Of course, It would probably be best to have a number of these wireless "trees" covering the same area to reduce lag and signal loss. Each access point could define it's own channel, and be spread out so each channel is far enough from the others.

        Of course, maybe I'm insane.

    • Re:Nationwide? (Score:4, Funny)

      by TamMan2000 ( 578899 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @09:18AM (#4004248) Journal
      Cool idea, but I think the GPS info would have to be broadcast to all cars to decide if the connection would be benificial. If this is the case...

      Think of the traffic law enforcment implications; every one is blindly shouting out their speed and position. State patrol could have a field day!
    • I worked on something related for a little while. Turns out that too many vehicle in close proximity isnt a good idea either, since background noise goes through the roof since lots of people are transmitting. Also, since you need collision detection, only one node in some area can be transmitting at a time.

      So, it isnt as good an idea as it seems at first sight since bandwidth might be quite bad.

    • Let's see, WAP "281-bc2" is northbound while WAP "192-kee" is southbound... With some pretty advanced signal strength metering combined with directions (electronic interfaces to compasses are cheap, some cars already have them) might negate the need for GPS.
    • Just think, the best reception will be during stop and go rush hour. Just when it is needed the most. Um, boss, I am going to be late today...

  • Obvious use - Voice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jbridges ( 70118 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @08:58AM (#4004203)
    Pity they didn't setup Voice over IP.

    Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.

    • They could have used their cell phones and done Voice over Cell Phone. Also, VoCP is clearer than VoIP. There's no downside!

      • Re:Obvious use - Voice (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jbridges ( 70118 )
        Cell phones cost money per minute, and as you may have read in the article, their Cell service was uneven, the WAN was far more reliable (connected 99% of the time). Those are a couple pretty big downsides to Cell.

        Also Voice over IP is as good as your bandwidth.

        With their WAN they could VASTLY exceed the sound quality of any Cell phone. If they could stream MP3s, all they had to do is encode MP3 realtime from an external Mic and Voila, Voice over IP.

    • Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.

      VoIP would have spared them the jargon, too. No need to remember silliness like 'breaker one five' and 'ten four good buddy', as well as some of the more silly mutilations of common english words in a (mostly failed) effort to make them sound more official, or technical (an example of such is in the subject line :-).

      Course, if they were going 95 instead of 65, they would want to know where all the 'bears' are hiding...

  • Last line of the movie (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anarchofascist ( 4820 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @09:01AM (#4004208) Homepage Journal
    If they ever make this into a movie (goddam there should have been a video camera operator in each car too) the final scene would have been a closeup on the driver's smiling face at the Perl conference, with a voice over...

    "Some called me lame, some called me cool, but they all called me geek."

    Final theme music, roll credits.
  • All was not lost, however, we resorted to remotely controlling Schwern's laptop to play random songs in the Passat and there was nothing they could do about it. I ssh'ed into my friends box acrossed the internet and did this, he got pretty pissed off
    • When I was in college, I connected to my computer in the dorms from the lab across campus. Witnesses say my roommate shit his pants when my stereo started blasting Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train". Ah, memories...

  • Where's the danger? Can't people read? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03, 2002 @09:07AM (#4004218)
    He wasn't "hacking while driving," he had a co-pilot. I don't see anything dangerous here.

    "Meng rode with me in my Hyundai Tiburon acting as communications officer and uplink controller."
  • Hmmm... I remember logging in via ssh from a powerbook G3 onto university with a Ricochet Modem while riding as a passenger in a friend's car. I didn't have a second friend Ricocheting simultaneously, otherwise I could have done something similar. Supposedly, it's still possible to connect from one Ricochet Modem to another directly, and it could be done car-to-car without needing the Ricochet network. Aah, memories...

  • Prior art... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Colohan ( 29716 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @09:53AM (#4004315) Homepage
    Check out the links to the Monarch project from Dave Maltz's home page [cmu.edu].

    Dave did his PhD thesis on the idea of routing packets between a bunch of wavelan cards moving all over the place. If you play up the military side of it (imagine every soldier/tank with wavelan, routing packets between them!) DARPA likes to fund this kind of stuff.

    Anyways, the most fun was had when Dave and his colleagues rented a fleet of cars, put a wavelan equipped laptop in each one (since this was a while ago, they were using the original 2Mb wavelan, not this 802.11b stuff), and were driving all over Pittsburgh trying to see how well packets would get through between cars....

  • ... may act like 800-lb. gorillas but it's highly unlikely that they act like
    "800-lb. guerrillas" as the article states...

    This nitpick may be minor, but it really does make a world of difference in the semantics.
  • I'm not a big enough geek to ever do something like this but I am a big enough one to have laughed my ass off during most of that story. I think the best, most telling line is: "Still later in the day we decided to stream MP3's from one car to another."

    It's so casual but when you stop to think about it... d'oh!

    I am a big fan of creative people, no matter what industry or field and this is a perfect example of creativity in the geek world.
  • Oh no! I've been the victim of a drive by hacking! :-)
  • It would save them the time of setting up the network and the networks cost. But o well it sounds cool. Could I have their vechiles for five dollers?
  • These guys aren't geeks, they're idiots... and they still used the damn cell phone.
  • I really hope that someone at Amtrack reads this. Seriously wireless broadband, especially on the Northeast Corridor Accella could be their killer app.
  • From Richmond to New York... We where on our way Mac World New York... We had a single Airport Base stationa and several laptop with Wave Lan cards... we played Star Craft. But we where all in one van.
  • This is saddly, a non event. With one Mac laptop with an airport card installed, you can turn on "Software base station" and that mac becomes your wireless hub.

    Turn on personal web and file sharing and put a 1 hour mp3 mix on your web folder. Have the other guy on a pc or mac in the other car, plug their audio output into their car stereo and you have audio streaming over wireless from car to car.

    Why throw a linksys into the mix when you don't need it?

  • War Driving (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm finding myself terribly amused by all the other people with laptops they must have passed during the drive, who suddenly found themselves with internet access.

    I always thought that the point of War Driving was to find 802.11 sources on the open roads, not be one.

    Maybe we need to refine the definition a bit. I guess the old way could now be considered "Defensive War Driving."

  • On a recent road trip from LA to Las Vegas, my friend and I discussed the possibility of setting up a mobile short-range "radio station" for a caravan of cars using one of those personal FM radio transmitters you use to listen to your 1/8" jack-equipped audio device in a car, such as the awesome iRock [myirock.com]. We dreamt of a "DJ" seat in someone's backseat with a laptop and music software (i.e. Ableton's Live or an MP3 mixing app), and the other cars tuning into the station to listen to a set. Then, when it's time for a gas/bathroom break, someone else gets to play DJ! Could be fun...
  • This reminds me of our drive to h2k2 last month. on the way to the trains tation, we ran an LPFM broadcaster in our car (driven by a minidisc player). We drove through connecticut with a sign in the window that said something to the effect of "107.1 FM w00t?"...

    ironically, we attended the LPFM talk at the con itself, which was pretty good. /me lix mobile pirate radio for hackers... to bad we didnt have a mobile radio show with the mic/preamp that we had.

  • Very interesting... it's been done (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tacky the Penguin ( 553526 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @02:34PM (#4005127)
    The writer was very creative in his use of off-the-shelf equipment. His experiment is a good proof-of-concept.

    Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators have been communicating via packet radio for something like twenty years. Since ham radios are used, the range is measured in miles rather than feet. The only drawback of that system is that the speed is limited to 1200 baud -- though higher baud rates are used on some of the higher bands. In fact, some hams use tcp/ip as their protocol (originally, packet radio used ax.25).

    For more information, check out news:alt.ham-radio.packet.

    Digital radio communication is actually much older than even packet radio. Technically, morse code is a digital medium. Somewhat later, baudot code was used, and hams communicated via RTTY (Radio Teletype). I'm not sure when the first RTTY station hit the air, but I suspect that it was in the 1940s or 1950s. Later, ASCII was used for RTTY, which had the advantage of lower-case letters and more characters.

    Packet Radio became popular in the 1980s, and the innovative hams used it for emergency communications, bulliton boards, email, and vehicluar communication. Some attached GPS units to the TNCs (Terminal Node Controllers), so a central station could track several mobile units. This turned out to be very useful for "fox hunting" (searching for hidden transmitters), and the more serious searches for emergency locator beacons and for illegal transmitters.

    The police have been using a form of packet radio for at least ten years, and probably for a whole lot longer (I saw one ten years ago). Rather than calling your license number into the dispacher, they can type it into the terminal and get a direct text reply.

    The military also uses wireless digital communication. They used RTTY way back in the ancient times when I was serving (no, we didn't use flintlock rifles). I used to repair the encryption devices that secured the links.

    The author expressed some doubt about securing a wireless link, but I am confident that any communication that the military is currently researching is well secured. They have been using crypto gear for a very long time. Rather than take a chance on being accused of divulging classified information, I will just suggest that you type "comsec crypto" into google and surf from there.

    The point is that once you encrypt the data, you can send it over any channel you like without fear of eavesdroppers.

    Incidentally, hacking the 802.11 box to produce more power is almost certainly illegal. The FCC takes a dim view of unlicenced people modifying type-accepted gear.

    I haven't researched the issue, but I believe that a ham can legally modify an 802.11 box. I am quite sure that it is legal if the operating frequency is moved to one of the ham bands (I don't recall if it is already in a "shared" band). Doing so will create other issues that I won't bother to get into right now, though.

    One final word of advice: Move the antenna OUTSIDE the vehicle. It'll work a whole lot better.
  • Wonderful stuff. Planning to do something like this when TwoTomCats [twotomcats.com] take to the Guyana interior in October.

    But since we'll be some distance (!) from a cellular network, we'll have to use satellite dishes. They'll be mounted on top of the trucks and will give us somewhat more bandwidth than a cellphone. If this come's off, I'll post to /. from Dadanawa Ranch [wilderness-explorers.com].

    Now,I'll need a bit more than 150 watts of AC power to get all this running. Maybe a small diesel genset atop the truck...

  • "When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...you're gonna see some serious shit."

    or

    "If we drop below 50mph the hub will explode!"
  • There's something to be said for elegance.

    2 + iBooks with Airport cards - stow the base station hardware and the inverter and drive for 6 hours a day MAYBE needing the lighter direct power adapter outside of that. Stay within a dozen car lengths.

    I'm wondering what made them leave the 19" CRT at home...
  • Wow, thats so kewl.

    But i was wandering whether you could just do this with 2 Macs with Airport cards inside? or heck, 4 macs with airport? or do u need a hub? I understand that it possible to do this with only 2 macs, but can anyone correct me if i say its possible with >2 Airport cards?

    Also, what about Bluetooth? Also, on mac, the bluetooth adapter can enable 2 macs to also communicate/share. I got that from the article I read off their website some time ago, so the facts might be wrong. hehe. :)

  • This is the niftiest thing I have ever seen.
    I'm going to try this on my next roadtrip. I keep my NB plugged into the car when I do my daily 32 mile commute. It's a nice way to pass the time in brutal afternoon traffic.
  • Hey, if they wanted to cut out the cell phone costs they could have always gone with a cable LAN! Sure, the drivers would have to pay attention not to snap the cord, and probably piss people off behind them who can't pass them, but hey, it would be cheaper!
  • 1. Have the AC inverter, wireless AP, and hub in the trunk. 2. Have the antenae outside of the car. ..then it would be much cleaner and possible better preformance.

  • How about a wireless server in a school bus? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pfhor ( 40220 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @12:14AM (#4006792) Homepage
    My highschool Shackleton [shackleton.org] spends about 1/2 a year on the road. We have iBooks with wireless. We drive big school busses across the country, where a lot of productive work could be done. So I put together a wireless fileserver consisting of an airport basestation, a quantum snap drive, and a 5 port 10/100 switch (for wired connections, backups, etc.). Attach that to a UPS and then to an invertor, and students could work on the server from any laptop with a wireless connection, no more worrying about which laptop they saved their files on.

    It was originally a p90 with 48 megs of ram and a crossover cable to the basestation. I would have loved to use a SBC with a wireless card and a laptop drive for better size / power usage, but I didn't have the time for a custom hacked job, which I didn't want to have to support when I graduated.

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