Rodney Myrvaagnes wrote:
"Armond Perretta" wrote:
Rodney Myrvaagnes wrote:

If I am in a Wifi hotspot that wants to be paid, will something
tell me so, or will it just not work?

Based on my quite limited experience with wireless laptops (I own
2 but haven't traveled yet with them) I suspect that just sitting
on a bench somewhere will allow you to connect, check mail, etc.,
with few problems. The knowing folks call this "piggybacking."

I suppose that depends on where you are, but it did work here. I
just called up the thing that searches for connections and it
identified a long list of nodes, most of them password secured with
first names lie Mary and Chad, but others unsecured. One of the
unsecured had a strong signal, so I tried it. My web browser and
mailer both worked fine.

I am amazed. I guess most of the nodes were my neighbors in this
large (about 500) apartment bldg. The node I used had a commercial
sounding name.

Yes, this will probably not work well on the Eastern Shore in Nova Scotia.
But then cell phones are pretty "iffy" there also.

Someone mentioned the legalities of "piggybacking" (which are far from
clear). The best reading is that as long as you are using another owner's
bandwidth and nothing else, you will not cause harm and are unlikely to
encounter difficulties. This is an ongoing topic in the wi-fi newsgroups.

The real reason that "piggybacking" is possible is that the average user is
blissfully unaware of the security aspects of wi-fi and does not secure his
or her setup. As long as web browsing is the activity, that's just fine.
But I would not do any banking or online purchasing on an unsecured network,
and even a "secured" network is vulnerable in many cases.

It boils down to how much effort an attacker is willing to put into breaking
in my network (and I suspect the answer is "not much.")

--
Good luck and good sailing.
s/v Kerry Deare of Barnegat
http://kerrydeare.home.comcast.net/