Friday, March 17, 2006

Free Public WiFi!

Now that I work near MIT, I can see all kinds of WiFi nets. Only one is open, labelled MIT. I bet you need some extra token or so for it, or everything on it is logged and sent to a billboard. Should ask and about this.

However, both here and at LAX, a network called "Free Public WiFi" popped up. Having been in post dot-com computing and the US long enough to be suspicious of free lunches, in both cases before connecting I noticed XP had identified is as a computer-to-computer network. I suspect there's some software out there that lets your WiFi laptop advertise itself with that string, and will download every cookie, every password, every command that computers duped into connecting to that network send on.

I told Puppy IV to avoid it.