I found myself stopped beside a Greyhound bus in DC rush hour traffic on the way to work today. The bus had a Wi-Fi icon painted on it. I had a Wi-Fi capable device with me in the car so I gave it a test. Sure enough, there was an open wireless network available. I could pick it up strong and clear more than two car lengths back. The network’s SSID was WAAV, which when Googled, turns up a website of a company that makes wireless devices that open two 3G cellular connections and provide Wi-Fi on the move. Over this dual-cellular connection, passengers (and the surrounding cars) could get up to 14.4Mbps downlink and 3.6Mbps uplink (GSM HSPA/HSDPA), plenty of bandwidth to support a bus full of web surfers, black hats or botnets.
You may, or may not have heard of wardriving, an old technique of driving around looking for open and unsecured wireless access points. This turns the concept around where the open wireless access point drives by you. I can imagine someone needing wireless access from an IP address on the move that can’t easilly be traced. Slide in behind a Greyhound bus and you’ve got connectivity, then turn away and the bus continues. If the bus can be tracked by IP address at all, the authorities are going to track the bus, not you in the car behind them.
These roaming busses with open Wi-Fi networks allow free and nearly untraceable internet access, if you have a vehicle and a bus schedule, you can do anything on the Internet you wish without being tracked down to a geographic location.