Who ordered this heat wave?

[nolawitch58]

That's right: all the fucktards who didn't pay any attention to the problem twenty years ago when it would have been a damned sight easier to fix. I am cranky and crabby from trying to clean house in this heat. I've got the A/C cranked down low, but that's not enough. I'll be lucky to only have to take two showers today. It's looking like a three-shower day to me.

Pete just left a few minutes ago. I'm ashamed to admit this, but you are my friends and you already know I'm a nutjob. The new neighbor was telling me how she noticed some guy frequently sitting in his truck on the corner working on his computer. I told her that he was probably wardriving and stealing someone's connection. Then I got to thinking: is my network all that secure? I had assumed it was because the antenna on the router has been broken ever since I got it (a hand-me-down from the Neutral Ground). Pete brought his laptop by because it has a wireless card. Lo and behold, he could connect easily to it. Granted he was five feet away from it, but I didn't like that a bit. I got the book out, renamed the network to FuckOff, secured it with password access and now I feel my geek cred returning. The lesson: don't assume that a broken antenna means a device can't receive some signal.

Back to the housework. I've almost gotten the downstairs carpet vacuumed with nice-smelling carpet fresh powder. I can only deal with housework in half-hour chunks then I have to take a break.

Comments

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

I like your network name :)

We finally got a break in the heat yesterday (along with what seemed like 6 inches of rain - when did New Jersey get relocated to Oregon?), and today is wonderful. It's going back to humid armpit tomorrow I think, but I share your misery.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Heh- fun network name! I'd love to see that come up on a sniffer!

How about hiding the SSID as well?

[tomo2k.livejournal.com]

It makes life a little more difficult under Windows, and damn-near impossible under OS-X

As for the broken antenna - having spent a day at a CE lab testing things that shouldn't emit radio waves at all, I now know that a tiny section of PCB track can be enough to radiate a fair whack of microwaves.

Small mistakes of that sort can even squelch the TV!

So the loss of your antenna probably only dropped the range by 50% or so.

Should clarify that a bit!

[tomo2k.livejournal.com]

Windows XP shows 'hidden' SSID networks as 'blank', but visible - the user has to manually type in the SSID to connect, as well as any encryption password.

Mac OSX doesn't show the network at all - the only way to connect is to manually set the SSID before trying, and you've no way to know a network exists.

Re: Should clarify that a bit!

[nolawitch.livejournal.com]

I did hide it. In the box that said "Display Public," I unclicked it.

[slamlander.livejournal.com]

You might also try to filter by MAC addresses. With no allowed MAC addresses on the list NO ONE can get in, even if they have the SSID. That's the only security that you really need.

Note: I have the SSID visible so that I can hook a variety of equipment in. However, the router doesn't allow MAC addrs that it doesn't know.

[ozanbaba.livejournal.com]

here we are trying to pour out create here it's not good in hot days