Open WLan´s in your neighborhood?

[Drufuss]

Last week i bought my girlfreind an apple macbook as birthday present so she can listen to mp3's and watch DVD's and TV (analog and DVB-T with an USB-stick) at home (with a small device that fits nicely to the interior of her flat, this is the first computer she really likes).
The macbook has inbuilt support for airport extreme (w-lan 802.1G) so we took the macbook with us, when we walked the dog this weekend, with airport enabled to see how many w-lan's are in our neighborhood and how many of them are secured.
Not to our surprise we found w-lan's everywhere, up to ten and more when walking by apartment buildings. The amazing fact was that many of these w-lan where named "NETGEAR" or "Belkin54g" and the majority of those with such default names where completely unsecured.
So setting the macbook to "autoconnect to available open w-lan's" would´ve enabled us to browse the internet or download files from the web without any problems during our one hour walk.

So it seems that many people are comlpetely satisfied when managing to connect their pc to their access point, maybe setting up a firewall to at least protect their pc somehow and don´t bother enabling any of the security features todays routers are offering (which seem to be disabled by default).

My cheapo DeTeWe ISDN-W-lan-router had his ESSID hidden by default and i had to connect to it via usb cable first to enter my PC's MAC-address to the address filter before i was able to use the w-lan. Enabling encryption and entering a key (WEP or WPA) us one of the first things highly recommended in the manual.

Greetings

Dru

P.S.: The sister of one of my co-workers received a call from their ISP last week to restrict her downloading for a while cause she has reached the 30GB download limit within the first two weeks of the month. She told the ISP that she was only reading her mails and browsing the web (amazon, ebay, wikipedia, etc.),
so the ISP asked her "Do you have a w-lan router?"
"Yes"
"Who set it up?"
"Well, a friend"
"Tell him to secure that thing, please".

[Rick_EE]

When I first got my laptop at work, I drove home with netstumbler running. I would say about 20-30% were unsecured. I can see two from my house, but they are secure.