AOL Laptop?

[DREDIOCK]

LOL After asking me what he needed to get him online My Brother in law picked up one of these at CompUSA.

He got like a $200 discount for signing up for AOHELL for a year
After that and other rebates, not a bad deal.dont remember all the nuts & bolts but for $550 he got a 1.8 ghz laptop w/60 gig HD
Epson print/scan/photocopy Printer, Motorola Surboard Cablemodem, Lynksys Wireless router &PCI card,


For his uses Im sure it will be fine. His uses will probably consist of surfing the web and using Mapquest (his main reason for wanting a computer)

For myself or my son I'm definately going to go a bit better.

Doesnt run bad out of the box. Thogh boot time is a bit slow.

Runs a hell of alot better now that I removed abvout 2/3rds of the crap AOL had installed on it.
BTW if you use AOL. Stay far far away from AOL 9.0 SE.
Thing is almost as bad as a virus and has more bugs in it then a low income housing development.

After hooking it all up and before I activated his internet connection through his cable company I was astounded at how easy it would be fore him to steal access tfor free through his neighbors.
He could have used "Jennifers, Rabbi134, glosg,DannyB or Klondikes internet access. ALL were listed as available connections
As well as two others that were listed as "Secured" and unavailable

Not knowint a real lot about how wireless works. isnt there a way to protect against this?

Thats why I didnt go wireless when I hooked up my house. And went and ran ethernet lines to every room cept the kitchen and bathrooms.

[eagl]

Securing wireless networking is easy but it requires the owner/admin to give a crap and be able to read/follow simple instructions, which puts it beyond the capabilities of 99% of American consumers.

You saw it yourself...  Several unsecured networks and a couple that came up as "secure".  It's trivial to secure a network against any casual intruders, and it's not that much more difficult to secure it against all but the most determined intruders.  It usually requires going into the wireless router or access point setup menu through the web browser, selecting an option clearly labelled wireless security, and entering in a passcode.  That passcode will need to be entered in the setup for each computer using the network.  That's pretty much it.  There are other ways to "stealth" the network but they're not really necessary to discourage most attempts to get in.

By the way, I think the feds are considering network intrusion a felony in the US nowadays, so if you care about owning firearms you probably want to avoid using anyone else's network without permission.