Four years ago I had a brief fling with wardriving. It went only as far as getting Ethereal to crack the security of our house-network. I simply couldn’t picture myself walking around the neighborhood with my laptop under my arm… However, jogging around with an iPod will attract far less attention.
Starting an iTouch in a network-rich environment you will be asked which network you want to connect to (see for example this wardriving video). However, if you need more information on the networks, there is a port of the OSX-tool iStumbler for the iPhone/iTouch : Stumbler (available also from the Install.app under Network). This morning I flipped open my iTouch in a generic street near the University and was surrounded by 12 wireless networks, 6 of them wide open…
One may then ask : what about less innocent wardriving tools such as Kismet or Ethereal itself? The problem with porting those seems to be that no-one knows whether the iTouch wireless driver can be put into ‘promiscuous mode’ (see for example this thread).
Once you have collected open networks at your favourite places or have passwords to closed networks, it would be nice if the iTouch would auto-detect these and connect to them without you having to remember the particular name or having to type in username/password combinations. Surprisingly, this is possible thanks to the people at devicescape.com. Create a free login, then get Devicescape Connect (available under Network) run it and write down the pincode you are given and follow the instructions to complete the installation. You can then edit your Wi-Fi list of desired hotspot or personal networks, together with all login-data. There is a nice TidBit article describing devicescape in full detail.