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Crossed Wires in Wireless

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VoicenData Bureau
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I get a new Wi-Fi connection at home.

After the engineer is done setting it up, I switch on my laptop and

there-I'm online wirelessly. But there's something not quite right about

it. Why didn't the Wi-Fi network ask for authentication when I tried to

connect to it? Does that mean anyone around my house or on the road can connect

to my home network and fatten up my broadband bill?

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Quite likely, if your neighborhood has a good number of young people. A

survey by a research firm, Jupiter Research, shows that 23% of the people

surveyed in the age group of 18 to 24 years feel it is okay to use unprotected

networks. This percentage, however, falls drastically for older people. Only 8%

of the overall people surveyed would want to piggyback on an open network.

Reasons vary. Older people work with more sensitive data and hence are more

careful about protecting it, and are also clear about the ethics part. The

youngsters, mostly students, on the other hand, are happy to use anything that

comes for free.

A fat

broadband bill is only one and probably the most harmless of the possible

fallouts of wireless; security is going to be the big problem

Symantec also did a small survey in the US. It drove through the

neighborhoods of Houston sniffing signals from Wi-Fi routers and checking how

many of those were encrypted. Of the 1,985 access points found, a full 40% were

not encrypted.The more affluent neighborhoods had a higher number of

non-encrypted networks. So was the case with villages having as high as 47%

non-secured networks. Symantec did a similar survey in New York, Chicago, Los

Angeles, and Washington, DC. Houston had the highest number of encrypted

networks.

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No one has surveyed this in India so far. But it is unlikely that the numbers

will be any better. Due to the high utility value, lowering equipment cost,

increase in the number of laptops, etc, India is set for a Wi-Fi boom. BSNL

recently announced that it was in the process of modernizing its networks and

would soon set up public wireless access networks with 300 hotspots in 15 cities

across India. The hotspots will be at places like hotels, airports, shopping

malls, university campuses, etc. Some Indian cities are planning metro Wi-Fi

networks.  Security is therefore

going to be a problem. A fat broadband bill is only one and probably the most

harmless of the lot. People with malicious intent can introduce viruses in

unsecured Wi-Fi networks, thereby putting all your computers at risk. One can

enter your machine and steal confidential data as your credit card numbers, bank

accounts, etc. India is a growing economy and the online use of credit cards and

bank accounts is pretty new and on the rise.

Unsecured networks are a huge hazard for such transactions. There is an

obvious need for customer education and for the suppliers to ensure that

security is implemented. Sadly not all do so.

While security comes after the network is up and working, one must say that

wireless networks also have installation problems. There is a multitude of

devices, and I have personally struggled with them, in setting up a network at

home. The wireless LAN card works but the USB dongle does not-at the same

place. Connectivity just disappears and comes back with the age-old trick:

switch off and on. There are some routers that work with the same connection

while others do not. On the same network machine A can talk to machine B and

machine B can talk to machine C but machine A cannot talk to machine C.

Transitivity does not work here.

Clearly, wireless still has a lot of wires to uncross. And the sooner it

happens the better it is. Because the benefits of mobility are far too many to

be lost due to implementation problems.

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