Imagine how surprised I was to find another wireless network within range last night. No, don’t imagine, it’s really not interesting enough for that. It’s just that we live on a steep hill and there are no houses level with us for some distance.

As I understood it, the wireless signal is set to radiate better horizontally and so a network above or below us would be harder to detect, as would mine. But I’m probably full of shit in this, as in so much else.

Anyway. Heh heh, I smirked to myself, as the SSID (network name) of “default” popped up, the idiots haven’t changed the default settings of their access point. It should be easy for me to access it.

But it wasn’t. Try as I might, I couldn’t access it in the end (and any further avenues, like KisMac, are a little too naughty for me – and anyway, I couldn’t get it to work properly). And then the smirk was wiped off my face when I checked my access point setup and realised that I was still set to crappy old WEP, crackable in less than an hour.

Oops.

So now, having read this handy eBook on wireless security, and tinkered for a bit, I’m now set to use the much better WPA.

Meanwhile, the other network has disappeared. Maybe they’ve upped their game too. Now that there’s at least one other wireless-savvy person in the neighbourhood I’d best be on my toes.