So I just got an Ipod Touch. I think the thing is fun. I can surf the net with only a little annoyance by the format in places that I would not be able to otherwise. The coffee shop, the other coffee shop, the cafeteria of the place I work, etc…
They are named as such:
“(Name of coffee shop #1)”
“(Name of coffee shop #2)”
“43564675354 (or somesuch)”
Fine.
The downtown area of the town I live in has a mostly younger crowd. Its a college town.
I pulled it out to look up a phone number/e-mail I’d saved in it and saw it was trying to connect to a wireless signal. Hrm… Ok…
It was called “Huge_Penis”… a weak signal that was locked.
I laughed and hit cancel.
Just now… In my bedroom I turned it on and found it trying to connect to another locked wifi signal (I live next to some college housing, I assume its them and not the over 50 without a computer crowd that lives in my building).
This one was titled MURDER. In caps.
I’m going to double check my doors are locked from now on.
Someone in my apartment complex has a WiFi connection called “It’s Not Lupus!”
(My apartment complex is a block away from the massive University of Michigan medical complex; pretty much everyone else in the area is a med student or a doctor.)
burg is my own base station. But the one that concerns me is belkin54g. That’s the name of a base station that has not been reconfigured from its factory defaults. It has no password. It is easy to google the manual for the base station, connect to its network and then its configuration web page, and take complete control of it, even locking it away from the owner’s control.
I know, because I connected in this way to a friend’s base station after I explained how vulnerable it was, sitting open like that. Now it has a password and a name.
So, public service announcement time. Even if you’re fine with letting neighbours use your connection, change your wireless base station configurations from their defaults, and especially protect the configuration web pages, before some drive-by hijacker does it for you and locks you out!
But was it secured/encyrpted? Because it’d be funny if a hostile network name was his sole means of security (“Shove off, eh, you hoser!”) One step short of setting up an open WiFi hotspot called “VIRUSES UNLTD.”, though.
Ours is called AwesomeWifi. I claim no responsibility for the naming of the network, though… that was The Boy’s doing. (this is, for the record, the same man who wanted to name our second cat Sega Genesis or Captain Lou Albano).
The other networks I can see from here are:
Veltmann
Bell 493
Apple Network e273f7 (how original… bet this is the Mac Geek next door)
Roula
Hera (we live in a Greek neighbourhood… can you tell? )
I find this subject fascinating: an SSID is a way to communicate totally anonymously with the few hundred feet around you, and it’s an unusual opportunity to make some kind of a statement. Here’s a thread we did a few months ago discussing funny SSID names.
Nutshell: [ul][]I ended up naming mine “teh intarwebs” []A lot of people came in and sheepishly admitted that they’d named their networks “skynet” [*]It is vital to refer to this XKCD cartoon[/ul]
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