Standard for public hotspots??
Forgive me if this has been discussed. My Google skills aren't what they used to be. Point me to whatever site that describes all this.
Been looking around for a common standard for defining a hotspot as open for public use. So far all I have found is recommendations to put "open" somehwere in the SSID.
That's nice and all... Look for SSID=*open* ... Problem is my Windows wifi utils do not appear to have a means of looking for hotspots according to wildcards. Manually looking for and joining hotspots as I'm riding (someone else driving) down the interstate sounds like a chore.
What would be nice is if those who want to provide open access could all agree upon a common SSID and/or WEP key. Then all I have to do is create a "Public Only" profile with that information and feel fairly confident that when my laptop/device automagically joins a hotspot that it is one other people have explicitly setup for public use. That way I don't accidently join John Q. Public's out-of-the-box-never-read-the-instructions panics-when-the-adsl-modem-light-blinks SSID=linksys/dlink/belkin54g WAP.
IIRC, some of the smaller community networks do this. Would be nice if we could do something similar on the nationwide level.
Or am I being too paranoid and should just let me laptop use whatever hotspot it finds??
Been looking around for a common standard for defining a hotspot as open for public use. So far all I have found is recommendations to put "open" somehwere in the SSID.
That's nice and all... Look for SSID=*open* ... Problem is my Windows wifi utils do not appear to have a means of looking for hotspots according to wildcards. Manually looking for and joining hotspots as I'm riding (someone else driving) down the interstate sounds like a chore.
What would be nice is if those who want to provide open access could all agree upon a common SSID and/or WEP key. Then all I have to do is create a "Public Only" profile with that information and feel fairly confident that when my laptop/device automagically joins a hotspot that it is one other people have explicitly setup for public use. That way I don't accidently join John Q. Public's out-of-the-box-never-read-the-instructions panics-when-the-adsl-modem-light-blinks SSID=linksys/dlink/belkin54g WAP.
IIRC, some of the smaller community networks do this. Would be nice if we could do something similar on the nationwide level.
Or am I being too paranoid and should just let me laptop use whatever hotspot it finds??
to be safe, you should probably not use networks you are not authorized to use.
only using an identified network that you have permission to use will always be legal. I agree that a tacit agreement for how to offer freenets would be a great thing. I like the common WEP key idea, as it avoids simple name conflicts.
widely held secrets like that would of course not offer security, but everyone deals with that at the application layer or via tunneling anyhow, right?
only using an identified network that you have permission to use will always be legal. I agree that a tacit agreement for how to offer freenets would be a great thing. I like the common WEP key idea, as it avoids simple name conflicts.
widely held secrets like that would of course not offer security, but everyone deals with that at the application layer or via tunneling anyhow, right?
Well, I got shot down right away on the Netstumbler forums. I guess I'm not 31337 enough...
http://www.netstumbler.org/showthread.php?p=107933
http://www.netstumbler.org/showthread.php?p=107933
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