“How the hell did you find that?” Alan said, looking at the darkened window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the back an aboveground pool.
Kurt laughed. “These ‘security consultants’"—he made little quotes with his fingers—"wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections available to baby-eating terrorists.
“One of the access points they identified was mine, for chrissakes, and mine was open because I’m a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I’m an ignorant ‘consumer’ who doesn’t know any better, and that got me to thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I really was trying to remember who’d played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I’d dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street.
“So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice sofas and things.
“When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the name of the network was ‘ParasiteNet.’”
Alan said, “Huh?” because ParasiteNet was Kurt’s name for his wireless project, though they hadn’t used it much since Alan got involved and they’d gotten halfway legit. But still.
“Yeah,” Kurt said. “That’s what I said—huh? So I googled ParasiteNet to see what I could find, and I found an old message I’d posted to toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his network after it.
“So I figger: This guy wants to share packets with me, for sure, and so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online.”
“You’ve never met him, huh?”
“Never. I’m always out here at two a.m. or so, and there’s never a light on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the bell and say hello. Never got to it.”