WiFi Ruler - an essential Android App

One of the good thinks about living in a well developed country is that you can get mobile internet access most places. What is even better is the fact that, you will nearly always be able to find a café or similar establishment which is willing to offer free Wifi internet access. However,  one thing that really annoys me is that many of these free access points will require you to click on a button to say that you accept their terms and conditions of use. I understand that mostly they have been advised to do this by overly cautious lawyers, but it is really quite ridiculous because nobody ever reads those terms and conditions anyway and if you were tempted to engage in illegal activity you would hardly be put off by the need to click on a button.

The reason why this feature is annoying is because many people would like to set up their phone to automatically connect to certain WiFi access points when encountered. This saves you the bother of explicitly configuring your phone to connect to the WiFi service every time that you enter the café. However, if the café has a "clickwall" connecting to the WiFi is not enough to give you internet access unless you explicitly launch your phone's browser and click on the button. What is even more frustrating is that your phone will probably disconnect from your mobile provider's 3G service on the assumption that you don't need this when you are connected via WiFi.

Luckily I recently found out that there is an Android app called WifiRuler, which can solve this problem. It allows you to set up rules for what to do immediately after you connect to a particular WiFi service e.g. click on the accept point or enter your username/password. This application will stay running in the background and automatically accept the terms & conditions on your behalf. There is even a blog where you can get new versions.

There is a paid and free version of the application, but to be honest I am not sure what the difference is.

Scanning the wireless activity in my neighbourhood

In a previous post I reported that when I did a survey of wireless access points near where I live about 2.5 years ago, I found that 7% of wireless access points were unencrypted. Recently I needed to check what wifi signals were active in my house in order to diagnose some signal interference problems and while I was at it I decided to do a quick check to see if the wireless landscape of my neighbourhood had changed significantly in the last few years.

This time, I did my survey using the wigle.net application on Android (2.5 years ago I was using a Symbian based Nokia phone - which is itself and indication of how things have changed in the meantime). I didn't walk quite as far this time, so the survey was less complete, but I was dissapointed to find that the percentage of unencrypted wireless access points in the most recent survey dropped down to 2.7% of the total. I looked at the data to see what had happened to the open wifi points and they were broken down into 3 roughly equal groups:

• The access point was still active and open
• The access point was still active, but was now secured with some form of encryption
• The access point was no longer active

I am not sure why people are becoming less willing to leave their wifi access point unencrypted, but from chatting to friends I think that people are not really concerned by the impact that casual users might have upon their own internet browsing. In fact they are more concerned about the fact that they could get into trouble if a passer-by used their wireless access point to engage in some illegal activity on the internet.

In the previous survey, well over half of the access points had a SSID of the form eircom_XXXX which is probably a clue that they got their wireless access point from eircom and never bothered to change the default SSID. Since eircom was originally the monopoly supplier in Ireland this showed me how many people like to stick with the default choice.

However, in the more recent survey I noticed that SSIDs of the form UPCXXXXX seemed to becoming more popular which probably indicates that many people are opting to switch to the cable modem service from UPC - although it also indicates that many still don't bother changing the default settings on their router. The following chart shows that based upon my totally unscientific survey UPC seem to have overtaken Eircom in my local market. Most of the people in the "other" category will have changed their SSID from it's default, so I can't guess what internet provider they might be using.

Are people willing to allow strangers share their internet connection through WiFi

A few years ago I signed up for the FON service whereby in return for allowing free access to my internet connection to any FONeros who happen to be in my neighbourhood, I get access to a range of internet connections that have been shared out by other FONeros throughout the world.

I thought (and still do think) that this was a great idea. However, as far as I can tell my access point has only once been used by a visiting FONero (probably because I live in a quiet suburban area rather than a busy city centre location that would get a lot of traffic. In additoon I never actually used anyone else's internet connection when travelling. A few times I looked up FON access points in an area that I planned to visit, but in all cases I found it hard to find the FON access point that was indicated on the map and surprisingly enough I always found that there was somebody not associated with the FON service who was already sharing an open wifi signal.

As it happens, I had an Open wifi access point in my home even before I joined FON because I am not really concerned about the fact that any visitor might want to share my internet connection. I wondered how many other people share a similar attitude to me. To find out, I installed the Barbelo application on my mobile phone and ran a scan while I was walking the dog though the neighbourhood where I live.

What I found was that about 7% of wifi signals are not encrypted. Because I live in an area with a lot of houses, there were plenty of open wifi points available (as summarised on the following map).


View Open Wifi Points in a larger map

I am sure that some of these people left their wifi signal open by accident and did not intent to share access to their internet, but I am sure that several others are deliberately leaving their wifi signal unencrypted as a courtesy to strangers who might be in urgent need of access to the internet.