How To Steal Wi-Fi - And how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours. By Paul Boutin
I found this article on the Lockergnome’s Mobile Lifestyle newsletter today. I found it quite interesting and when we first moved out to our new home last year. I had my network open, but I would find times that things were acting flaky, but I never found anything in my logs, but I did turn on WEP encryption at that point and I have really noticed any problems since. I also didn’t think that any of my neighbors had wireless networks around, because my laptop wouldn’t find them. Then my sister in law brought her’s over one day and we were trying to get some stuff working and she wanted to print, so I said just jump on the network and print and then she said, which one is yours. I was blown away. Her wi-fi card was much stronger then mine and picked up the neighbors across the street. I figured out which one, by walking up and down my street till I got the best signal. Now I pay for my internet every month and have offered my one neighbor who doesn’t spend as much time as I do out here to jump on mine from his house, all we need was a directional antenna, but he finally broke down and got his own. So I would never use my neighbors open network (though I’m not going to tell him its open either). We are on different cable providers so I know that if my ever goes down that I will be able to get on his. That doesn’t mean that I will freely let him into mine, but if he was to ask I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I have had 5 pc’s running on mine and haven’t seen a slow down at all. But the point of the post was that I found the article interesting.
