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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

I had an Orinico Gold WiFi card in my PCMCIA expansion pack for a Compaq Ipaq PDA back in the early 2000s. It was awesome!

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I have a fond memory of my older brother buying an Orinoco card and putting it in his laptop and then us cruising around town wardriving back in the day

What does wardriving mean?

Wardriving was driving around town with a laptop scanning for WiFi access points without any encryption. Most wardrivers would have a GPS card and software that’d build a map up as you drive of all SSIDs and locations, which could be uploaded and contributed to by others.

This was back before ubiquitous open WiFi and encryption.

Slight amendment.

The heyday of wardriving (IMHO) was before the industry got its shit together with WPA.

Because before WPA, there was WEP. Which it turns out had multiple vulnerabilities, given enough traffic.

https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/understanding...

Ergo, there was a period from ~1999-2004 whereby one could aim a Pringles cantenna at a neighbor's AP and crack their WEP password in order-of-an-evening (depending on how much traffic they were generating).

Not that I ever did such a thing, mind you.

Used it for that too! https://i.imgur.com/omNpSPr.jpg

They’re great cards and easy to write drivers for. I still use one in one of my thinkpads for wireless because it used to be the only card supported by 9front and plan 9 back in the day.

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