This morning, for the first time this year, I brought all my junk out to the deck in the back yard with the idea of getting some work done. Instead, I ended up dissecting the WiFi landscape in the neighborhood.
There’s a nice piece of free software called WiFi Scanner. (It’s in the App Store.) It will look for all the WiFi it can find and display lots of information about the source. It’s running on my MacBook Pro and is refreshing the scan every five seconds. I am amazed that in this suburban neighborhood, where the houses certainly aren’t packed together, I can see about 30 WiFi sources. Some of them aren’t very strong, so the number jumps up and down as sources drop in and out. It’s been as high as 37 at times. Oh… my… security… There are seven routers with completely open access. I joined three of them and was able to see the devices in the homes where they live. I’m tempted to send a short warning about security to their printers. Three more have passwords using only WEP encryption. WEP was never a very secure acronym to hide behind, and it can be broken in a few seconds by anyone. Four more are protected by WPA, which is better, but can still be cracked with some effort. The rest have WPA2, which is a lot better. (WPA2+AES is the choice everyone should use.) L^2 --- Lee Larson leelar...@me.com <mailto:leelar...@me.com> (502)741–0370 Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
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