One Of Life's Little Mysteries...Solved!

Specifically, why do I always see an icon for "Free Public Wifi" on my lap-top when I'm looking for a network?

Apparently, there was a bit of a bug (one of many...) in Windows XP in terms of how it handles certain situations, and it effectively created a "virus" in that unwitting travelers around the globe are all broadcasting "Free Public WiFi" from their computers without realizing it, after they tried to connect to such a network:

When a computer running an older version of XP can't find any of its "favorite" wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -- in this case, "Free Public WiFi." Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. And who can resist the word "free?"

Not a lot of people, judging from the spread of Free Public WiFi. Computers with the XP bug that try to connect to the Internet will remember the name, create their own ad hoc networks and entice other users wherever they go.

And so it continues to spread. No one's quite sure where it started, but somewhere way back when, someone set up such an ad hoc network in an airport (perhaps as a joke or a honeypot), and it got picked up by others... and then it just continued spreading. Eventually, it should die out as Windows XP machines finally go extinct, but for now, enjoy (but don't bother connecting) the "Free Public WiFi" found in so many airports...

Its noted in the comments that XP service pack 3 fixed the problem, indeed I haven't seen the icon on my laptop for over a year.

Buckets On The CHRC Wifi Case

I think B's conclusions are essentially the same as mine (because he was the one that worked most of this out in the first place), but he gives a nice breakdown of the puzzle. He doesn't speculate as to why the RCMP did not pursue the "technical data" from Stormfront, merely notes that "a closer look at the evidence wasn't possible given jurisdictional issues".

I, on the other hand, would speculate that Stormfront owner Don Black, who was instrumental in filing the original complaint, could have simply handed over this technical data--presumably logs--to the RCMP (as was done with the original IP address) but, for whatever reason, chose not to, and the jurisdictional issues that arose were the kind that would have been involved in compelling an American website to provide material to Canadian authorities.

Buckets hypothesizes:

Black would not want to hand over his logs to the RCMP, of course, since this would expose many of their Canadian members to prosecution for hate crimes.

And it is far from clear what shape the logs themselves were in. Or, indeed, whether Black ever consulted them. (It is likelier that he merely used his bulletin board software's lookup feature.)

How true how true.

Lemire Retreats! Speechies Get Stiffed!

Somewhere out there, Marc Lemire is putting the final touches on a 500 page "book" outlining his constitutional challenge to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. However, Ezra has already posted the CHRC response and, not surprisingly, he has ignored the most important bits.

Firstly, Lemire has long claimed that CHRC staff in general, and CHRC investigator Dean Steacy in particular, posted racist material in the course of their investigations of various White Supremacist websites. Well, no more! From the CHRC document:

The respondent has conceded at page 400, line 4 that Dean Steacy posted no racist material in the course of his duties as a Commission investigator.

Naturally, Ezra, Kate, Mark Steyn, and etc., were happy enough to regurgitate Marc's nonsense. I imagine now, in light of all the lawsuits his pronouncements have generated, that Mr. Lemire will not be on their Xmas card list.

However, my favorite bit concerns Lemire's whole ridiculous "hacked wifi" conspiracy, in which CHRC employees, whose laptops were not wifi enabled at the time, were apparently able to hack an encrypted network from about 350 meters away, or three times the effective diameter of your typical wifi hotspot. This charge was bone-headed to begin with, and the MSM (esp. The National Post) touched a new bottom in journalistic credibility by reporting it with a straight face, even after Buckets and I publicly refuted it (well, Buckets did most of the work, but he is shy and retiring and doesn't like to make a fuss). In any case, it appears that Lemire has dropped these accusations from his brief as well:

There is no allegation in the respondent’s written submissions corresponding with previous allegations in motion materials pertaining, inter alia, to disclosure, that the Commission breached the privacy of the individual whose name was publicly disclosed as a result of a subpoena granted to the respondent by Bell Canada, or that the Commission gained surreptitious access to her wireless internet service. The evidence did not establish any such surreptitious access and this was denied vehemently by the Commission. The Commission considers this unsubstantiated allegation to now be withdrawn.

Of course, Ezra, Mark, Shaidle and the rest of the "Canuck Six" were quick to broadcast this drivel to the world as well, with Mr. Steyn going so far as to accuse Dean Steacy of criminal acts by name. Presumably, they will all apologize immediately.

Your Daily Nazi: What A Wifi Bandit Can Tell Us About The Hechme Case

I've blogged about the Hechme case on any number of occasions. Now this this Time Magazine Article, which describes the adventures of a wifi thief, helps make my various arguments for me:

You don't fly first class when you're stealing bandwidth. Wi-fi hot spots are large--about the size of a football field--but those signals had to pass through a lot of masonry before they got to my laptop.

"The size of a football field"--so lets say a hundred yards by a hundred yards. However, Flanders (and I think his is the most conservative estimate) puts the distance between Hechme's apartment and CHRC headquarters at 370 meters (1,202 feet), or about four times the distance our wifi thief claims to be the effective range of a standard wifi network.

This range can be increased with the use of special equipment (although 1,200 feet is still at the extreme limit of the doable), and indeed Flanders believes that the CHRC employed such equipment. However, not only is there no evidence for this (nor even that CHRC laptops were wifi enabled), we venture well into Ron Paul territory if we think the CHRC would maintain special gear just to steal the wifi from the local citizenry, especially when any number of unsecured wireless hotspots can be found within about a 100 meter radius of the CHRC building in Ottawa.

Wi-fi operates on an unlicensed frequency, so it has to deal with interference from baby monitors and microwave ovens and cordless phones too. As a result, my Internet access would vanish and reappear like a will-o'-the-wisp, even when I engaged OS X's excitingly named 'interference robustness' feature.

Which is to say that it is exceedingly unlikely a wifi connection could have been sustained for the 24 hour plus period suggested in the testimony from Bell Canada (Dec.7 at 6:36pm and Dec.8 at 9:35 pm).

You Daily Nazi: The Shorter Buckets

Buckets begins to make his case. The For Dummies Version:

1) StormFront Moderator PatrickOdin claims that CHRC investigator Dean Steacy posted to StormFront on Sept. 15th, 2006 from IP address 70.48.181.203.

2) In March 2007, Freedomsite owner Marc Lemire, who has brought a criminal complaint against the CHRC for hacking Nelly Hechme's wifi, asked Stormfront founder, Don Black, for IPs related to the activities on Stormfront of one Jadewarr, Dean Steacy's Stormfront Pseudonym. Black provided Lemire with the IP address 70.48.181.203. Lemire then subpoenaed Bell Canada for information about this address.

3) However, because Bell uses dynamic IP addressing, by December 2006 the address 70.48.181.203 had been assigned to Ottawa resident Nelly Hechme, who lived about a quarter a mile away from the CHRC HQ. And when Bell technicians revealed this fact, Lemire hatched the "CRHC employees hacked her wifi" conspiracy theory.

4) Except: what are the odds that Dean Steacy hacked a wifi account that, by sheer coincidence, bore the same IP in December as the IP borne by his own account about three months earlier? I would suggest they are rather low--"infinitesimal", as Buckets says.

Where does the story go from here? Read more in the upcoming few days, but here's a couple of hints.

Hint One: Most likely nobody visited Stormfront from 70.48.181.203 on December 8, 2006. Not Steacy, not Hechme--nobody. Lemire's criminal complaint, which refs that IP number, will therefore come to nought.

Hint Two: Given the search tools employed by Stormfront, a thorough search of IPs related to Jadewarr should have returned more than a single address. And the address used by CHRC staff in December, 2006 is almost certainly sitting undiscovered in Stormfront records.

Update: Buckets unspools more of the mystery here.

Your Daily Nazi: Definitive Account Of The CHRC "Wifi Hacking" Controversy

Bucket's (pictured left) revs up his extraordinary brain to take a crack at the alleged "hack" of Nelly Hechme's home wifi network by CHRC operatives. That Dean Steacey and other CHRC employees commandeered the wifi network of an Ottawa citizen in order to visit Stormfront (a Neo-Nazi bulletin board) is an allegation made by noted white supremacist (and now Free Speech Hero) Marc Lemire.

I won't go into details in this space, because Bucket's first three posts ( here, and here, and here) provide an extensive background to this thrilling episode, with conclusions to follow.

But... something to consider: Bell IP addresses (like 70.48.181.203, the one Nelly Hechme possessed in December of 2006) are assigned dynamically, belonging to different owners at different times.

The CHRC: Like James Bond, But EVIL

As Dr. Dawg notes, Ezra Levant has graduated to openly accusing CRHC employees of criminal acts in the strange case of Nelly Hechme and her hacked wireless account. And he does it all on the say-so of Neo-Nazi Marc Lemire.

Given the abysmal coverage of this story in the MSM, it is entirely unsurprising that Ms. Hechme might think that she has been spied upon by The Feds. However, the content of her latest interview with Canadian Press makes this even less likely:

Hechme disputed an initial media report that her wireless Internet access was unsecured and therefore easily hacked. In fact, she said, it required an encryption key that could not have been guessed or casually cracked.

When she forgot the key, even she couldn't access the connection, she said.

"It was so secure to the point I couldn't get into it (so) I'm not sure how they got into it. It's very bizarre."

Since most of the initial news reports on this issue came through the National Post, its not surprising they were bung jobs.

However, lets run back through the two operative theories of how the CHRC might have gotten access to Ms. Hecme's wifi:

1) From CHRC headquarters at 344 Slater (Ottawa, Ont.), a distance about about 400 meters from Nelly Hechme's condo, and through a block of office buildings, commission staff located Ms. Hechme's secure network and, employing super sekrit technology, hacked it.

Note: Your typical wifi connection is good for up to about maybe 100 meters, so probably the boyz from the Commission needed to use some additional super-sekrit technology to even pick up her signal through all the metal and concrete in between.

2) CHRC investigator Dean Steacey, who is legally blind, somehow transported himself to the doorway of Nelly Hechme's condominium building and hacked her secure wifi network from a car outside or the condominium lobby. This would alleviate the need for one set of super-sekrit technology to pick up her signal over great distances.

Wow! you're probably thinking that these guys must not only be Evil to the level of Magneto or Dr. Doom, they must have access to 23rd century tech support! Cue the black helicopters!

Except that, if Dean Steacey or any other CHRC employee bent on nefarious deeds had stepped outside the door of 344 Slater, they would have found themselves in range of any number of unsecured wifi outlets, as well as within 200 meters of a fistful of Starbucks, which usually have wifi service. So all their elaborate scheming would have been completely unnecessary.

Your Daily Nazi: Wifi Edition

Mark Lemire is trying to figure out who visited the Neo-Nazi portal Stormfront on December 8, 2006 from IP address 70.48.181.203. As I have noted on several occasions, his theory is that CHRC operatives hacked the private wireless connection of an Ottawa resident living about 1,200 feet away though a block of downtown highrises and across a park, even though this is pretty much impossible without special gear.

Now Mark has provided a wireless scan from outside of the Ottawa's CHRC headquarters in Ottawa to bolster his case. It

...shows numerous unsecured wireless access points in range.

And so Mark asks:

How many others have been similarly targeted by the out of control Human Rights Commission?

But of course this is the wrong question. The right question is: why would anyone with so many unsecured hotspots in the immediate vicinity even attempt the Herculean task of hacking a private citizen's account 1/4 mile away? (And why, in any case, would they need to stay connected for a full 24 hours, as Stormfront records indicate?)

Honestly, I don't know what happened with 70.48.181.203, but since investigations of the 90sAREover posts indicate that Mark and his combüdor X-berts have managed to trace this visitor to a Rogers regional proxy handing traffic from (and masking the real IPs of) perhaps 10,000s of PCs, I'm not going to bother. Just file it under Nazi dumbness.

Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice

...shame on Jonathon Kay for, yet again, becoming the unwitting dupe of the Canadian White Supremacist Movement:

The most scandalous disclosure to emerge on Tuesday involved the manner by which investigators logged on to Lemire's Web site. In what appears to be a ham-fisted attempt to avoid revealing the commission's IP address, they tapped into the unsecured wi-firouter of a 26-year-old Ottawa woman who lived near the commission's 344 Slater St. headquarters. At Tuesday's hearing, a Bell Canada employee read out the woman's name, address and phone number to shocked audience members. A National Post reporter contacted the woman and found that she'd never heard of Lemire, Steacy, or his investigations. Unless she is secretly working undercover for Steacy, it appears that the commission cynically invaded the privacy of an innocent citizen in order to pursue an obscure Web-trawling vendetta; and then caused her name to be read out to the Canadian public, thereby identifying her as an unwitting conduit to neo-Nazi Web sites. One likes to imagine that the privacy commissioner will be having a chat with Dean et al. in coming days.

This claim has come up in two versions. One, which I wrote about yesterday, has CHRC employees accomplishing the impossible task of tapping into the wifi network at 750 Laurier Ave. from about 1,200 feet away, through several concrete office towers. The other has a legally blind CHRC investigator doing a little wardriving, and camping out in the lobby of the condo building in question in order to access the said network.

Crazy ideas, but the most important point is that both theories are the brainchild of Canadian Nazi Mark Lemire, whose previous display of technical sleuthing ability got Kay and the National Post into so much legal trouble just one month ago.

But still, Kay and co. are back to sip from the trough of Nazi wisdom. I guess any fool can write for the Post.