As reported at Ars Technica the lead developer of KisMAC has called it quits due to changes in German laws which make it creating security applications illegal. For those of you who don’t know, KisMAC is a good network stumbler for OS X based on the ever popular Kismet. I recommend you go ahead and download KisMAC before the site shuts down.

In my humble opinion, the new German “Anti-Hacker” law is a step in the wrong direction. It just restricts development of legitimate security applications and limits new security research. Its a lot like having a law to restrict guns…if guns are illegal only criminals will own them. How can we expect to protect ourselves from crackers if there the only ones with the tools? Seems like Germany is starting to believe in the impractical Security by Obscurity theory.

Let’s just hope the Open Source community adopts KisMAC and continues development of this nifty application which helps people find and map legitimate wireless hot spots along with verifying the security of their own wireless networks.