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August 12, 2004

Hey, You, Get Offa My Net!

By Glenn Fleishman

My colleague Lisa Napoli gets the old bootski from her kyped (not Skyped) Wi-Fi feed (reg. req.): I met Lisa on my last trip to L.A., and wouldn’t be surprised if there are hundreds of competing Wi-Fi networks in her downtown aerie. She’s encountered what’s certainly going to be an increasing problem for apartment and dense urban dwellers—that’s dense like urban density, not…well, you know what I mean.

What happens when 500 networks in a building are called “linksys,” “default,” or “netgear”? Robert Moskowitz, a security expert, has argued for unique network names out of the box for new Wi-Fi gear, and Apple is one of the only consumer companies I’m aware of that chose that course. Apple gear has an SSID of Apple Network 012345 where “012345” is replaced with the last six digits of the base station Wi-Fi adapter’s unique network hardware identifier. Buffalo uses a similar way of distinguishing their WI-Fi gateways before configuration.

Posted by Glennf at August 12, 2004 1:13 PM

Categories: Home, Mainstream Media

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