It happened twice to me during the past two weeks that I've been working on my iBook in a semi-public place and suddenly realized that I was connected to a wireless network - and had access to the internet. Both times pinging the broadcast address revealed that only the router and my laptop were part of the network.

So twice I've found a WLAN router that offered DHCP services and internet access without a password or even encryption - and Apple's WLAN implementation simply takes advantage of this by default. I'm pretty sure that those networks have not been supposed to offer the service to me.

Germany's DSL providers are currently selling WLAN routers packaged with a new DSL line at reasonably low prices. I assume their default configuration is to accept everything - for ease of installation. I wonder whether they tell their new customers to change the configuration (and the customers simply don't care) or if the non-tech-savvy customers don't even know they offer public services.

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