To be fair, the author does explicitly admit to a bit of sniffing, and what better than Kali for that purpose. Who are we to question or judge his higher or baser motives? It may be that he likes to inform his not so learned neighbours that their WiFi is wide open to less than scrupulous crackers.
He might just be a good neighbour. He might like to win friends and influence people by knocking on their doors at 7:30 am sharp and saying: <best robot nerd voice> Hello. You do not know me. But last night I sniffed your network and couldn't help but notice you visited alt.dot.lick.my.heels.com 32 times within the hour, every hour. An outside adversary may be able to use this information against you. Just thought you might like to know. </best robot nerd voice>.
At which point he will either be taken inside for a bacon butty and a bit of bonhomie, or taken to task and headbutted with a bit of a hospital visit. If he's done it before, I'm sure he has it down to a fine art and knows what he is doing. Who said the art of intrigue was dead?
It's one thing to clock or ping or find an open WiFi point, it's another to use air crack ng or metasploit or wtf it's called to gain entry. Besides, there are other ways in even with those that have WPA enabled that may be using the router default 4 digit wireless password thingy. Forgive me, I could look it up but it's late. There's many that think they are safe using this protocol as opposed to WEP was it? When in fact WPA with this option enabled on the router can be cracked even quicker iirc.
It may also be for emergencies only. Some setups don't even alert you to the presence of other networks, be they open or not. I know that windows has stopped showing all other networks around me even though there are a dozen or so where I am, and some of them are even open via pay (BT). Not sure why this is. One day they were there, the next they were gone. When I'm in Linux they magically appear out of the ether.
I would say if the author has been transparent enough with us to share his 'predilection', we should at least grant him some good will in return. Also, Kali is one of those distros like Parted Magic and like Knoppix that are known to work with a massive subset of wireless cards, by their very nature, so compatibility and getting up and running quickly may also be a concern.
True, today, if you run the latest version of Mint, that will probably find your card and do the same, but it wasn't so long ago where it really was hit and miss to get wireless drivers up and running. I know coz that was around the time I came into Linux 2010 or so Mint Julia kind of epoch. And if you are running an old laptop, it's quite feasible it has an old wireless card, and hence needs older drivers, that may only be available out of the box from a wider database, such as those installed with Kali.
Then again, I might have totally misunderstood all that at a fundamental level.
It may even be that the author is a hopeless romantic and just likes the name and the desktop that comes with Kali - I know I had that on my win7 machine for about 6 months! Kewl, as they used to say, before it became unkewl to say it. And even unkewler to write it.
We may never know the author's true motivations for his esoteric choice of distro, but I for one, don't feel as if an explanation is necessary. That was it and he documented it. The reasons I've laid out are all plausible excuses for choosing this distro. No, it's not a desktop/office distro, it's a straight out of the box/get up and running quick in compatibility mode, kind of distro.
And I for one, again, applaud those that do not follow the Linux Mint Everything root. The 'what does this do', and the 'what happens if I do this' school of computing is slowly being lost, watered down by standards, that we feel we must adhere to, when we need not. That's the old spirit of computing in my book, and no one need be brought to book for displaying that kind of attitude.
I say all this of course, as a hopeless romantic myself. Long shall we reign. Or, err, at least hang around on the peripheries, sniffing whilst we still can. It's the world's oldest sport! Ok, maybe the world's second oldest sport.
Definitely time for bed now. Going into lockdown... 5.4.3.2.1... Confirm no open ports being sniffed... Do not respond... Do not respond... Stealth mode...
Goodnight.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
