Mine is currently named Gorgonzola. It’s unsecured, but somebody would have to be sitting in my driveway to access it. Heck, I can’t even use it outside my house!
My favorite is when I’m sitting at a long stop light, and whip out my iPhone and see I’m on wifi - usually to an access point named “linksys”.
The ones I can see from here are all quite boringly-named. Oddly, there are two where “Mehio” is the first part of the name. Is that a brand? (none of my neighbors are named Mehio). One “home” and one “linksys”, both unsecured.
Ours may change in a few days when the FIOS installer comes - supposedly that comes with a wireless router also. We may have the installer turn off the wi-fo on their router and just connect it via ethernet to our router, as we at least know the security setup on our own.
There’s also the welcome message you can specify for the base station to send to computers that join the network. Mine says, “Bonvenon al la sendrata reto de Komiksulo, uzante 802.11b/g je 2,4 GHz.” Yes, it’s in Esperanto.
Mine has the simple monicker of Linksys. Straight out of the box with only a couple of changes to the config.
Of course, if you’re connected to it you’re trespassing on private property and I will avail myself of my right to put a slug through your wireless device.
It varies depending on the unit. The name is formally called an SSID (Service Set Identifier, I think).
The configuration pages for your unit should give you an option for changing it. You may be able to connect to them by looking at your network preferences, finding the IP address of the base station, and typing “http://” followed by the numeric IP address, followed by “/” at the address bar of a browser.
On my Mac it’s different. You start “Airport Utility” and that goes out and finds the base station, then presents you with an interface to adjust it.
This only works if you’re using an Apple Airport base station. If you have another router, you’d have to do it by IP address in a web browser.
What I will say is the default address of most routers is http://192.168.1.1, with blank username and password ‘admin’. And if somebody has hijacked and reconfigured yours, you should be able to do a factory reset to clear everything out and set it back to the defaults. Usually you hold down the reset button until things start blinking.
Oops, yes you’re right. I knew I was forgetting one critical piece of information.
Apple base stations, of course, have to be different; by default, they establish themselves in the 10.0.x.x range of IP addresses. That’s still in one of the ‘reserved for internal use’ ranges of IP addresses.
I’ve never bothered to look at other people’s before, but my neighbors carry the names of chicken nugget
Access DENIED
rooster
Bosch BME
SYLVIA
Darling
Poucca
woooo!
dlink
2WIRE727
wagner
Olivia Papa
meathead