My wife, daughter, and I took a little trip to Minnesota this weekend to see some friends. First we went to Duluth/Superior, then we headed back down to Minneapolis, and we made our way back home this afternoon.

While we were gone I needed to dedicate some of my time to writing a research paper for school. I unholstered my trusty PowerBook about six times during the trip. I was amazed to find that at three of our stops I was able to access the internet through unsecured wireless networks. Two of the networks were home users running on Linksys routers with the password featured turned off, and one network used a Netgear router - I’m quite sure it was also a residential user.

The hotel we stayed at also featured a free wireless network. In order to access that network, however, I needed a room number and password. This was probably to keep people from stopping by the Fairfield parking lot and using up the hotel’s bandwidth. It was nice to be able to do some work, access maps, and find phone numbers without having to tip the front desk workers, though.

The best network I found on the trip was on our last stop. I was connecting to the internet at over 100 Kbps, which is about three times faster than I can ever sustain at home. (Though there are times that my speeds are up there.) I was so impressed with this person’s network speed that I was tempted to print a “thanks for letting me use your network” page on his/her printer had it been on. Wouldn’t that be freaky to come home, walk into the computer room and see a page sitting there - “Dear Neighbor, thanks for letting me tap in to your network. I’ll never buy cable again… bwahahahahahahahaha…” Of course, there are probably some other people in the neighborhood using his/her network, and I would hate to ruin their free ride.

This makes me wonder if it’s illegal for neighbors to go in on one cable modem and share the network throughout the neighborhood. It definitely gives new meaning to Microsoft’s “Network Neighborhood.” It also sounds like something we would have done in college. (You know, the first or second times I was in college - not this time.) College kids can find anyway to save money. Ask my buddy Brad about his Blatz-returnable box spring. I’m serious.

Well, we made it home safe. I am now going to secure my wireless network. Sorry neighbors.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 1:38 am and is filed under General, WiFi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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