Strange airport thing! free internet???
 

Hello!
I was just messing around with my new Mactop and managed to get connected to the internet through Airpoty using a LinkSYS connection except i havent actually signed up for anything and not sure what the deal is here!! can i get charged for this or am i just tapping into one of my neighbours networks? its too amazing to belive, free Internet!!
Also can however owns the connection know that im doing it, see what im doing and maybe put a stop to it?
cheers

It's fairly impossible for us on a forum to know from whom you're getting this wifi acces, but it's probably your neighbor's unprotected WiFi.

If they know what they are doing and/or pay attention, they definitely can see that you are stealing broadband from them, and they can definitely put a stop to it.

Stealing is definitely what you are doing, and it's immoral and illegal. You should endeavor to find whomever has this unprotected wifi and ask them to please learn to protect it.

Im getting my own Cable broadband connection sorted out in the next week so im not actually planning to use this source but as a fairly newcomer to Macs and Networking, i was more just wondering if stealing another connection was actually what i was doing i didnt realise such things were possible and am just curious into this apparent phenomena
I amnot trying to be be immoral
Another thought, would it be possible for me to find the base or whatever it is thats providing it from an IP or will it be a case of knocking on doors in my flat

It's definitely common in today's growing usage of people with Wifi access points in their homes for convenience, but not actually knowing (or caring) about how to secure them from others. For most folks, it's simply a task of taking it out of the box, plugging it in, and connecting from their laptop.

As you found, it's pretty easy to stumble upon another person's wifi access point without even trying that hard. There are a lot of unsavory individuals out there that actively seek these unprotected wifi access points for nefarious activities. This is called wardriving.

As for finding the person, it's going to be on the difficult side. If it's a base unit, then it's got about a 100-150ft range, which is reduced by having to penetrate walls. It's range is effectively a torus run from the antenna, so this person could be anywhere around you, including above or below you. Probably your best bet is to print up a little flyer (and posting it in a central location) that states that there is an unprotected wifi access point running on a Linksys-blah, and that it's owner should really learn to secure it from prying eyes. Remember, that this could also be coming from neighbors in the next building.

I commend you for wanting to take the high-road and helping secure the internet a little more for the safety of the rest of us. Many thanks.

About 80% of APs are left unprotected. You can't save the world from themselves, and telling one person that his AP is open is pretty pointless in my opinion.

Wardriving is NOT a nefarious activity. I do it all the time for the purposes of learning and experimentation, but I don't abuse the found APs in any way. On the 25 mile drive between my home and office I can find over 100 open APs now, growing every day. I've been paying attention to this for some time since I work in the industry. There's zero harm in wardriving itself.

You are correct, wardriving in and of itself is not illegal, and not necessarily nefarious.

However, what legitimate purposes do you have knowing how many and which open APs there are in your location?

And you cannot deny that there are individuals out there that use open APs for questionable purposes. However, the majority of people that access them are probably not doing anything illegal, just using them for free wifi internet. But this is still a grey area in the legality surrounding a "new" technology (new to lawmakers who are always 5-10 years behind the times). Personally, I wouldn't have any qualms about voting on a law to make it illegal to have others access a wifi connection that they were not authorized to use.

I disagree wholeheartedly that it's a waste to attempt to get this open AP closed. It's that kind of attitude that perpetuates the "80% of APs are left unprotected". If more people took the time and effort to help those who don't know close and protect their networks maybe it would be a paradigm shift from 80% open to 80% closed.

With personal and corporate security becoming such a hot topic in today's technology sector, I would think more people/groups/ISPs/companies would want to invest more time into educating users on how to protect themselves and their networks. Unfortunately, the focus is currently squarely on viruses, spam, and pop-ups.

The problem also being that most users want it to work... but don't want to do anything... They just say its too complicated and leave it as is as they do not understand what kind of problems they are exposing themselves to...

That's true, but this is one source of viruses and spam! If some one gets into your wireless network they can potentially send these out from it. You wake up one day to find that your ISP has locked down your account because they think you've been sending out junk mail! Truth is, even though it might not have come from your computer, you would be responsible for it. It would be coming from your ip address!

Thats one of the "problems" indeed...

My 30 second take on this: most WiFi vendors other than Apple provide both inadequate documentation and truly amateurish web-based configurators for their devices. It does not surprise me that someone who does not work with them regularly would have difficulty programming the bloody things.

The AirPort Admin Utility and Setup Assistant are things of true beauty to this ex-software engineer, matching the utilities that Shiva and Global Village used to produce. :cool:

Shiva. Wow. Blast from the past. I have a Shiva 8-port modem dial-in box sitting in the corner. Still chugging away after 8 years.

Understanding the industry in general, and specifically what's going on in my area. It helps me understand interference issues, general usage, etc. Plus I'm a geek and just wanna know.

Absolutely. I keep up on this stuff, and there are some interesting cases. How would you like to be the 60 year old woman woken up by the FBI investigating a hack originating on her cable internet?

But how do you know which APs are open by accident and which on purpose? There are so many free hotspots now, and more every day. What if your computer just hops onto one at random? What if you allow one called "linksys" somewhere, and auto-connect to another elsewhere with the same name?

It's a very gray area, especially for non-technical users. I oppose making the use of an open AP illegal, much as you can't be cited for trespassing across a yard with no fence. Hop a fence, now it's illegal. If you won't put up a fence (enable encryption), then the onus should not be upon the user to find out if you really meant to but were too lazy.

This can also happen with a Windows wireless PC, it has nothing to do specifically with Macs except that it's often easier for a Mac to jump on a network.

If you download a software like MacStumbler, iStumbler, or AirStumbler, you can track signal strength as you walk around and that might help you identify the location.

Unless I take appropriate precautions (as I would at an Internet cafe) I do not jump onto wireless networks that are not mine, for my own protection. I am well aware that if unless a secure connection is used, my traffic can be intercepted and read. For example, if you are posting on this thread on your neighbor's network, it is possible for them to read your posts and your site username/password in transit. Your e-mail login/password/messages can also be eavesdropped in public since they are not encrypted unless you are using SSL. "If you can see them, they can see you." If any of your sharing services are on, you may show up on their computer. These days, one of the sneaky giveaways is that if you have your iTunes sharing on, your playlists may show up in their iTunes and then they would know something's up!

However, your neighbor may be one of the 95% of the public who would not have the first clue that it might be happening on their network or how to listen in.

A different viewpoint
 

I've got a Linksys, so who knows -- maybe I'm the one he's connecting through! (Not really, I don't live in an apartment)

Anyway, my access point is unsecured. Not because I don't know how to secure it, but because I don't mind people connecting through me. In fact, I'd like to see a future where you can connect to the internet for free everywhere, because everyone's running a wireless router -- and I say router because the whole network could be wireless; no landline needed. By running an unsecured access point, I'm doing my part to bring that about.

For the same reason, I don't feel bad about connecting through somebody else's network (although I probably wouldn't use it to go on a BitTorrent spree, or anything like that).

Now, granted, I ought to set up a proxy or something to stop people from sending spam and such (maybe allow SSL only, so if they did something illegal at least the ISP couldn't tell?), but I'm lazy and haven't gotten around to it yet.

I completely agree with you on that ideology. However, then reality steps in.

The reality is that you are committing a federal crime by doing that. And yes, people HAVE been prosecuted for purposely providing open APs against their TOS. It's called theft of services.

Also, people have woken up to find feds with machine guns storming into their house looking for the person who was hacking (the bank, NSA, CIA, White house, etc). Or the person downloading kiddie porn. Or whatever.

So while I would like to get to the idea, right now you're wide open to real problems. Problems that HAVE happened to honest people.

Well, it depends on which ISP it is. There are some ISPs who like the idea and will even help you share.

It's nearly impossible to find who might own an unprotected network and once you convince that person to secure it, someone else pops up and you have to start all over again - let people mind their own business.

What is more problematic is the fact that in a densly populated area where there are many wireless networks, if they're all protected, they collide and often NOBODY can get a clear signal. If they were all left open, you could just jump on the strongest one and you're good to go - today you might use mine, tomorrow it might be Joe's down the hall - in the end it would all work out.

WiFi the way it's set up for home users is not well thought out imho.

Getting back to the original post. I know of several households that have more than one laptop - each with different requirements in terms of wireless connectivity and trying to get it all secure and working together is more trouble than it's worth so they just leave the network open, unplug the laptops when they're not using them and forget about it.

The folks that know how need to spend less time pointing fingers at the stupid people that won't/can't secure their networks and figure out a simpler way to make it all work.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Margaret

Personnaly, I had a bad experience with trying to have a neighbor understand that their network was insecure... (By the way I know those neighbors and there aware that I have connected through their network)... I even offered them to setup everything for free and they would not want it (Why, I still can't understand though...)... What made it worse is that they started saying their speed was getting to be bad and they got one bandwidth usage bill... They tried to blame it on me and their kids (I have twice the connection speed they have and no cap, so I realy doubted they could make this stand...) So I basically monitored their network for a few days and after looking at the log I found that there was someone hogging all their bandwidth with emule... And still they did not feel that security was an issue (to them security is not getting viruses) and they said that the person would eventually tire and buy their own access :eek:
So I did what I had to do... I blocked all portsd and denied service to all IPs... Sounds extreme, but a reset fixes this... And what did they do ? They actually made a call to the store where they bought the modem and these fellows charged them 75$ to come and configure it... At least this time it was secure...
Just to prove how people actually battle securing their own network, at their expense...

Your frustration is understandable, but there comes a point where if you're choosing to implement the technology, you have to bear some responsibility for it.

I agree with you, that there's a number of people quick and content to say that the users are idiots. Yet I and I'm sure a number of others here who seek and give help freely would say that all the time, it's not our responsibilty to "make it work simpler".

People go out and get wireless, as an example for the convenience of it. When buying something like this, they dont give serious consideration to the security side of it, even if it is critical to conducting business. It's a bit like buying a car. You may need it to get from point A to point B, for work, but you're not going to buy one that you can't lock, because you VALUE it. it's expensive, and a necessity.

Home network security is becoming a lot like that. Although it may be easy or convienent to jump willy-nilly onto networks, that very convienence has the potential to do harm by nefarious forces at work.

This is where end user responsibilty begins. If you're going to get it, at least have a basic understanding of how it works, and how security or encryption works. Then learn the simplest way to implement it. There's no driver's ed for this type of usage, and I think it's a fair thing to ask. Just as it's fair to find easier ways to implement security.

Passing the blame buck back to the folks that make it, or those in the know doesnt absolve that responsibilty. It's no better than the folks in the know the "point fingers". Convenience is no excuse, on both sides of the fence.

Ironically, I'm pretty aware, and on top of securing my home wireless network; With my car, I leave the doors unlocked. I never really leave anything of value in it. Why? well, I've spent more money repairing shattered windows from those stealing or attempting to steal my car radio than for the radio itself (no one wants to steal the car ;) ) Ironically, in the years since i started doing this, I've only had one taken. Before it was getting ridiculous, once, twice in a month.

My condolences for your car radios... :D But I guess a simple way to force implimentation of basic security on users would be to have router setups work as setups work for other programs... Force them to use a wizard for the setup and this will obligate them to at least specify some settings... Don't need to make it complicated... An example that could be used a s a basis for this is the wizards used by ISPs that just ask the user to feed in some info and explaines how and where to find it (usually exctacting the local machine info for you)... Would that not be enough to start with ?

Problem is, if you force them to use security (or even make it the default), then you have to support their other devices which won't connect to it because they are too lazy to make it work. Then you end up supporting Windows, Mac, Xbox, and whatever other device they might have.

The current state, let Darwin cull the herd, is likely to stay the way it is.

It's slowly getting better. Some companies are starting to build one-button security where the devices work out the key amongst themselves like how Bluetooth pairing works. I think this is the way to go for the masses because frankly, wizards suck. Wizards are a series of koan-like questions that appear one at a time and you can't see what you entered previously or what's coming up...it's nearly context-free. Microsoft thought wizards would make things simpler, but they just made things hard in a different way.

Let them learn from their own mistakes is basically what will educate them I guess...

Well even those of us who are willing to do some research throw our hands up in frustration.

I started out with an Airport Extreme Base Station that would only work 20% of the time because it kept getting clobbered by my neighbors network or overheating no matter where I put it. I tried all the hints and tips that I could find on the net after spending hours searching and nothing could make that thing work for more than an hour at a time. I finally ditched it and got a Linksys.

The AEBS works brilliantly in my son's house which is in a less densly populated area - lesson learned? AEBS doesn't play well with others. Was it worth $400 CAD - NO!!

The Linksys works fine with all my Mac equipment and rarely gets into a quarrel with neighboring networks but when it does, I can usually coax it into working again. Following Apple's advice, I use WPA encryption.

But then I got a Windows PC that came with a wireless card. There was nothing on the box or in the documentation for the computer or the wireless card to indicate that it would only handle WEP encryption (which my research suggests is less secure) - I didn't discover this until I got home with the new computer and tore my hair out trying to connect to the wireless network. When I eventually figured it out, I returned that computer (it fell short of my needs in lots of ways) and got a different one. This one had wireless "built-in" again there was no indication of what kind of encryption it could handle but I was delighted to discover that it could handle WPA so my network was once more in harmony.

Then I got a WiFi card for my PDA and to my chagrin, I discovered that it could only deal with WEP encryption - once again this important fact was not advertised and could only be discovered by trial and error.

Now things got interesting. The Mac PB could handle any kind of wireless network encryption, the PC laptop could only handle WPA and the PDA could only handle WEP......

Can you see why I might be tempted to say the he||| with it and leave the network open??

Manufacturers of these things could put a lot more thought into them.

I DO the research, I DO pay attention and I'm frustrated.

Most people don't have the time to spend. I'm fairly knowlegable about computers, if a bit slow, imagine what ordinary people face.

Darwin my foot.

The comparison to a car is ludicrous. Cars come with standard ways to lock them. Imagine if cars came with some obscure locking mechanism that required the purchaser to do days of research before they could take the car to the mall for the first time or even safely park it in the driveway.

Margaret

I agree. The argument from that side of the fence seems to be just that. I guess you can't make 100% of the people happy. I'm a mac and linux guy at home; for my day to day work..in ofice or out, I'm more productive on my mac than my coworkers on thier Compaqs. Ease of use is at play. But, i'm a tinkerer, and there are times that OS X ease of use gets in the way. It's easy to complain about, because at that moment, things arent going the way I want them to and as the consumer, I want to gripe (we see a lot of that here, eh? :) ).

I'm not arguing with you, and my analogy was a tad off.. but I meant a car that wouldn't lock at all. no standard mechanism.. no nothing. You can't lock it. And you KNOW you can't lock it. If you can't lock it and you buy it, and someone comes along and either steals the car or steals something inside of it, is the person who sold you it at fault?

If you can't understand encryption, or arent to be bothered with it, then you can't secure your network. You can't lock it.

And please understand I'm not referring to you directly, but the scenario in itself. If a person can't conceptualize it, then they can't do it. And sometimes, it's critical that they do.

At home, I use WEP , MAC address authentication and LEAP. I'm looking to move toward RADIUS. Why use WEP? Well, let's see... I use a Cisco Aironet 350 Access Point. In my Powerbooks and the one IBM Thinkpad that connect to my network, I use Cisco 350 PCMCIA 802.11b cards (LEAP). in my B&W's and G4 I use Microsoft PCI cards (Broadcom chipset) that use the Airport drivers. For the iMac and iBook I use Belkin F5D6050 USB Wireless adapters. The other PC's and Macs are wired.

The Belkin devices were inexpensive and only do WEP. At the time, WEP was suffficient. I could replace them with Airport cards, but for the price of Airport cards I could buy SIX of the Belkins. The Airport cards and the Belkins dont do LEAP. The Aironet AP and the PCMCIA cards were the first wireless gear i had. I trusted Cisco. Still do. But at the time buying PCI Cisco adapters price wise wasn't an option... like Airport cards weren't. Part of this led to me crafting that Mac wireless adapter list in hopes that some of it will help others and in turn MAYBE help solve problems I might have.

I actually posted here for a little help in implementing RADIUS and EAP, thinking there might be a way to get away with that on all these different devices. For now, I manage the three different types, in three different ways.

I'm not suggesting everyone do this. or be that in depth. I am suggesting that people really do thier homework. For instance in your case, You prefer WPA, yet have bought devices that support only WEP. If the box doesn't say WPA, only "supports encryption" that's not good enough. Sometimes.. well MOST times the sales guy's assesment of the product isn't enough. You need to see that it says WPA on the box. If it does and it doesn't work, then you have someone to blame.

In some cases, one cant get away with using that one technology.. I imagine your PDA device was one of those instances. I'm willing to bet you can't find a competing device that does WPA.

Yeah, this can all be frustrating. But is it the fault of the manufacturers who make competing products? The fault of those who "know" how to get this stuff working yet don't make things easier for those who don't? The fault of the consumer who probably doesnt do enough research or wont allocate the time to learn/conceptualize the technology?

Doesn't the blame..or cause for frustration spread across all those layers? I ride the fence as a consumer and a provider of services. As a provider, i know I can't make everyone happy. But I'd like to think I go out of my way to make things as seamless as possible. And as a consumer, although I'd like to point the finger back up the chain, I realize, that there's a good chance there's a person whose shoes I've been in somewhere up that chain.

So before I do that, I TRY (not saying I always do) to be conscious of that and come as prepared as possible for my purchase, or when approaching them concerning a problem with the product. A number of us in service conveniently forget that when we become customers.

I work in the industry, and have never heard of a card that can do WPA but not WEP. I don't think it exists. And every card I've seen has the WEP64/WEP128/WPA capabilities listed in the spec sheet, or on the web site.

If you needed a part or add-on for your car, would you buy one from the same dealer, or just go get one that looks similar from any random auto parts supplier? If you did the latter, would you expect it to work properly?

The car analogy may not bee so far off... Let me explain... Every one is saying that users don't know what encryption is... that may be true... but lock a car and give the key to someone who doesn't knwo what a key is and they won't go far either...
The fact that companies have started offering things like firewalls and anti-viruses to their customers but that are (from what I can see) mostly controled from the ISP's end is a good idea... cause then its "knowledgeable" (though this may vary depending on the one you get on the phone :D some are just flakes that seemed to have slipped through the cracks) people who get ot configure it.. and the user pretty much can't tinker with it or turn it off... I know that here in Canada Sympatico from bell offers that... but since I'm not a customer or have not heard feed back on it, can't say if the idea is a success or not... But it can't be worse than the time their offered Linksys routers at a discount but offer no support to users... can it ? :confused:

I would have thought so too, but this PC laptop came with an internal wireless card and I can't find anywhere to enter the WEP key or switch it to WEP - if you know how, please enlighten me.

Not sure if you're with me or against me on this point :rolleyes:

Margaret

I'd like to think we're all on the same side. :) And maybe if we can stop being uber geeks and take the time out to help our wayward neighbors, and they show the patience and willingness to learn how to get thier wireless networks secured, we can all sing camp songs :)

D00D! S'Mores!!

Please don't eat the iPod shuffle...

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!

I agree and I'm doing what I can in that regard. I also think though that as IT professionals we should be lobbying the manufacturers to do a better job of making things seamless for the end user.

If it wasn't for all the folks who don't know a byte from a cheese sandwich being willing to shell out their hard-earned cash for home computers, all of our toys would still be costing way more than they do.

The manufacturers are selling the things about the same way as they sell toasters, and with about the same amount of instruction - in fact this PC laptop that I'm using right now had less in the way of documentation than the new steam iron I got last fall.

Take care Margaret

PC laptop??!! Somebody needs a new Mac mini.

I just might get one :D

My PowerBook is in the shop right now. It developed a problem with the trackpad and then an external mouse wouldn't work - ever tried to use a PB with just the keyboard?

I tried backing it up to an external hard drive, but it wouldn't recognize the drive either so it was one sick PB.

I got a call yesterday from the shop - they've replaced the trackpad and now that part is working - so is an external mouse, but it's still not recognizing the external drive so there's still something wrong with it so they've ordered a new logic board..................

This P*C laptop isn't that bad, but everything is so buggy I never know if something is a "bug" or a "feature" :D

Margaret

Then someone seriously screwed it up, because Windows isn't "buggy" all on its own.

I'm curious, what's the machine/card that seems to only have WPA? I'd like to research it and figure out if some are actually shipping with WPA only, which would be a new thing. And probably really bad.

Sarcasm? Yeah, must be.

If you install only windows on a system made out of good hardware and don't install anything else it doesn't have too many issues... Install Office or Windows media player and you may run into problems :D But I must admit... they have been getting a bit better at it with XP... a bit...

That's the typical Wintel excuse given by IT types bent on keeping Windoze. It usually goes along the lines of: "A properly configured PC will be fine." All that does is set up the user for blame when it doesn't work right. If the premise is accepted, then when the system doesn't work, the user must have done something wrong to the configuration. While almost anything (computer or not) can be badly configured, if you start hearing a lot about properly configuring any product, you should be wary.

You should be even more concerned if you can only install the OS and one or two apps! What's the point in having the computer anyway? Aren't there supposed to be lots more apps for Windoze? But you can't run them?

Sigh. Not yet another Windows-bashing thread. I've supported and worked on Windows for 15 years now. It works. It works well. In fact it works perfectly until people dork it up.

I like my PowerBook better. But it has given me a LOT of problems, most of them documented here. One turned out to be a bug that Apple eventually fixed, but meanwhile it cost me a LOT of time and a little data loss. I've had to reload the OS several times. Mac OS is not perfect either.

Neither is more buggy than the other. MS gives you more opportunities to shoot yourself by not controlling the hardware, and because there is much more software available to booger up the system.

When I had my OS X problems, everyone immediately told me to start removing things, it can't be OS X's fault. I had the same answer as what you just said. But then it turned out to actually be a bug in the OS. I've found and reported one Windows OS bug in 15 years of using it, and found and reported one OS X bug in 1 month of using it.

Those of you who keep insisting that Windows XP has intrinsic bugs and problems and can't run reliably are simply WRONG. Period. I can point to hundreds of machines I support which run perfectly day after day in real-world usage.

Sure you can. And I can point to just about EVERY pc in every office I've ever worked in and list problem after problem. The office I work in now has about 10 PCs and the owner is seriously thinking about hiring an IT person because there are constant problems! It would be funny if it weren't so costly.

The fact is, I like this forum because it's the only Mac related place where I get that feeling of accomplishment you only get when you get something difficult to work. Every Mac user I know (and I've supported Mac users) just keep using their machines with no troubles. They don't fear installing software, including system updates, either.

Though I am curious what bug this was you found in Mac OS X, and bite my tongue on the whole 15 years/1 bug thingy..

I don't want this thread to go any further afield than it already has from the original topic..

So, let's get back on track.

Thats Yellow.. And for those who don't remeber the subject anymore it was about connecting with a Linksys router ! :)

Sorry, but when I saw we went from an Airport equiped Mac connecting via an unknown router to a PC Laptop, I figured we had changed subjects. Plus, I didn't see any Mac related technical issue. As for the other platform, I remember what they used to say when I was in IT: "Sorry, I don't support that platform"
:rolleyes:

Where disconnecting an external VGA monitor from a PowerBook (or others) would cause the LCD screen to go black, rendering the machine unusable. The only option was hard shutdown or SSH to it and force restart. Apple fixed it (listed fix) in 10.3.7 I believe.

When I called support, they said they'd never heard of it, but after much talking, agreed to take it to engineering and call me back. Never heard from them. On this or that VPN gateway issue, for which they also promised a call back.

At least when I reported my one found Windows bug they stayed in touch through the resolution and subsequent fix. Also found one in the messaging subsystem of Pocket PC 2000, and same deal, MS stayed on top of it.

And that is not Apple bashing, but pointing out that MS isn't always evil, bad, nor producing intrinsically bad products. Note that I still love and use Macs. But Windows is not broken per se.

On that score, I would be happy to debate you. Just not here. This is a Mac forum.

heh, the last decent OS Microsoft put out was Windows 2000, XP is a step down, and so will the newer version, plus it still has it's huge problem with ActiveX. And that fact that M$ no longer supports there older software makes you wonder....

The whole WiFi thing can seem harmless to people who no nothing about the internet, and i would suspect some people have no idea they connected to someone elses network ilegally, or think it comes with the computer. But there are some places that don't have unmetered broadband connections like we hae in the US, and the more you use, the more you get charged.

That's why Mac OS X and Windows both have ways of not connecting you to an unknown network by default, which was allowed in earlier OSs. On the Mac it's that message you get about "do you want to add this to your list of trusted networks," and Windows XP has a similar feature that is of course implemented badly. By that I mean I was asked for help at a cafe by a girl who could not get on the free wireless network, and it turns out there is a checkbox you have to dig through the insane Windows UI for and it has to be unchecked or Windows won't connect to an unsecured network.

Both companies did this because there were just too many instances of, for example, office workers opening laptops and unknowingly getting onto the unsecured wireless network of the next office, cut off from their own resources yet exposed to the wrong company's business information, sending their print jobs to printers in other companies, etc.

:rolleyes: NT just reached end of support. How old is it. Is Apple still supporting OS 7?

While most things about OS X's handling of Wi-Fi are superior, I find that editing the list of automatic-connect networks is not obvious nor quick. Windows wins on that one. It took me a while to figure it out, and when I show people who have problems connecting, they say they'd never have thought to look at it that way.

Right, but people still often don't understand this. And as I pointed out earlier, if they legitimately connect to an AP with a default of other simple name, then they can connect to other APs with that name automatically later.

Well, I think the thread has officially re-beaten the dead horse, and continues to veer off topic, so I'm going to close it.