My neighbors sure are a trusting bunch...

Using an external omni from my mini this is what I pick up.

Thats an awsome app to have. I wonder what it would look like in my complex.

this was a ten minute drive through a nice neighborhood where i live:

It's funny to see how many people just leave the settings at the default. Some people don't deserve to have routers, if they're not even going to bother to learn how to protect themselves.

Whats even funnier are the people that actually change the names on the routers but leave wep off lol

It is sort of sad. I would go driving but I am still working on improvising an external antenna on my PB. The stock antenna is not particularly good. I went driving with my thinkpad and found quite a few more but that list is just what I can reach from my desk.

My boss thought that restricting mac address would protect his access point so I had to disabuse him of that belief. A lot of people just can not be bothered to set up WEP properly, much less WPA.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying this stuff if from others computers? How is it you can see that?

Ya, my house doesnt have wireless but my neighbors do so I mooch all the time if I want to use the laptop in my living room.

You could download one of twwo apps. iStumbler or mac stumbler! They are free, I believe you can get them at versiontracker or macupdate!

iNAP said:

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying this stuff if from others computers? How is it you can see that?

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What these people are seeing is signals they are picking up from other peoples wireless routers in their area.

In my old neighborhood (fairly densely populated area) there were two protected and one open wireless networks. Plus mine, once I got it up. (With WEP of course.)

Most people will never know that other people are using their network...until the FBI shows up with a warrant for distribution of child pornography, or they get served with notice that they've been sued for sharing copyrighted music.

I have a question guys.. I tried to set up the WEP on my wireless router, because my neighbor is the mooch type (He tried using our dish-network signal too, and tried ordering porn) ...I have a passphrase and it randomly generated 4 different passkeys. Can I use any of these 4 to log on?

My neighbour here has an unpassworded, unguarded Belkin 54g network. If I were to choose to, I could (illegally) log on to his router and change all the settings. I could also use his bandwidth to order porn, make bombs, or conduct all manner of illegal activity if I wanted to, and it would be traceable directly to him. Alternatively I could snoop his network packets and get his banking details... I hasten to add I don't do any of these things, but that's not to say nobody else is.

To my mind this makes Belkin rather negligent, and certainly very stupid - they don't even have a default password on their router! Let alone forcing the user to put WEP encryption on the network. It seems totally ridiculous not even to password protect the router by default. Surely the manufacturers should take at least some responsibility for protecting their users, even using the most basic precautions?

I'm not naive enough to think that my own WEP encryption is very secure, but at least I have a lock on the door. My neighbour has left his alarm off with all the doors and windows wide open.

thermidor said:

My neighbour here has an unpassworded, unguarded Belkin 54g network. If I were to choose to, I could (illegally) log on to his router and change all the settings.

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i think about that all the time.

All you need is a wireless sniffer (Airmagnet etc:>) to see and traffic on your wireless network. Me personally I do this on a weekly basis for a client that does credit card transactions. I think the software is PC only

lol, this is exactly why I always say enable wep. its not so difficult that it should be ignored.