After reading Tom’s recent blog about unencrypted wireless networks I thought I would take my own little expedition around town to see what was available. Equipped with my trusty PII 300, wifi card, and a wireless network scanner, I ventured off into the digital horizon.
All up I found 138 wireless networks around the city in my short stint of lapping. Of those only 85 were encrypted. About 50 percent of those had their SSID broadcast switched off and only 32 of those 85 had WPA_PSK encryption, the rest just had WEP.
Over the past two months I’ve been building an old Dell CPi D300XT from the ground up from parts I’ve purchased off eBay. Originally I was going to put Windows on this machine so that I could cross develop my websites without having to bug Mel to check out my handiwork using Internet Explorer. Unfortunately for Mel, the only legal version of Windows that I own isn’t compatible with this laptop. Fortunately for me Gentoo Linux works a charm. I’m constantly amazed at the multitude of cool apps that are available on Linux. You can do so much more, even with old hardware like this, on Linux than you can readily on Windows.