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I made a brief drive with my new Stumbler setup: 5 dBi antenna and Orinoco Silver card on my laptop. Unfortunately my budget has not allowed a GPS yet, so my wife made some notes about the locations while we drove around (on a shopping trip):) The route was in Houston: on Beechnut, to Fonderen, to Westheimer until Kirkwood, and back via Hillcroft. Of the 24 APs logged, only 3 had WEP enabled! Many of the APs seem to be out-of-box settings, incl. default SSID. The only ones I think should be open were tmobile AP at Starbucks and another at Meyrland Plaza (no Starbucks there, what I know).

Are these people just plain nuts and/or stupid ignorant optimists? I would not tolerate such openness in my network. I know, WEP is not perfect, but at least it prevents a casual connection and free access. My friendly WinXP notebook popped once a window asking if I would like to connect to one of the available networks.... My wife handling the PC refused the honor at my advice. But I guess there had been easy to dig deeper for one willing to break in.

In a big city one does not leave doors unlocked, but these wireless "doors" are obviously wide open. Understand who can.

Welcome to the Houston stumblers. So far I have found about 2600 different AP and about 80% are not encrypted.

L8r Days & Waves......

CannonFotter

heh, take a ride downtown by the Hyatt

i found a some

i cant wait to get my antenna working

who installes these APS is it techs or usually employees who never watch the news and have no idea. 2600 APs 80% unencrypted thats big