So there’s a guy who is sharing our home Wi-Fi connection. Which is just fine – we have, most seconds of the day, bandwidth to spare, our connections are pretty end-to-end secure (remember kids, trust no-one). We leave out AP open all hippy-style for exactly this reason.
I know he’s out there, because he shares his iTunes via Rendezvous and I have once seen him on my Rendezvous iChat Window.
There’s a reason I’ve only seen him once. He messaged me to say “Hi?” and I replied “Oho! Who is this hiding in my network?”. As everybody with a dash of social sense told me, that could be perceived as being a bit scary, and he immediately signed off. I’ve never seen him again, until today when I spotted his iTunes collection. His name’s Matt, and he’s the only person I know who bought the Daredevil soundtrack album. (Well, “know” is perhaps too strong a word, given that’s *all* I know about him.)
I’m trying to work out the politest way of saying “Hello neighbour”. So far, I’m sharing a bunch of fake music libraries called “Come say hi on ichat!” and “Are you across the street or next door?”. Still sounds a bit creepy, but can you do?
No response yet, but judging from the crappy streaming from his laptop, he’s got a pretty weak signal. We could probably fix that with some judicious aerial re-alignment. If only I could get in contact with him. And, dammit, I want to borrow that album. Or at least talk to the only other person in the world who liked Daredevil.
Practical upshots
Idea for Freshmeatable app: a program which scans DHCP allocations and tells you when somebody joins your network. For extra points, packet sniff their traffic until you’ve built up a reasonable profile of their email address, IM screenname, homepage, etc. Bounce all that into your favourite social networking app and pull out a picture, and other privacy-leaked data of who you’ve got on your network.
This is sort of like Kevin‘s wardating idea. Wardating involves sniffing for IM packets on shared wireless cybercafe networks, and then IMing the cutest people and ask for dates. Kevin is cute enough to get away with this.
My version is for people who don’t go out much, and lack the social skills to strike up conversations event with people who owe you a favour, and are already practically in your living room anyway. Warcocooning?
Maybe you could write it as a plugin forDashboard. Clues from strangers!
(Moral and legal conundrums of sniffing people who are using your network are left as an exercise for the reader.)