Flashes of Panic

Anyone who has gone war-driving, or searched for free wireless from odd places, knows that the best suspects are networks named “linksys” or “NETGEAR”, either of which suggest network hubs running the (insecure) default settings.

We’ve never had a default network name. Our first wireless network was given the name previously applied to the building our apartment was in: Hawley Middle School. When the owners opted to do a condo conversion, I renamed the network “Hawley Exiles”, and kept that name through the move to Amherst and now out here in Medford.

In Medford, we’re in a denser neighborhood than I’ve ever lived in before, and there are a lot of other wireless networks in the menu when I look around. “linksys” and “Belkin54g” are out there, of course, but when we’re all overlapping, people start paying attention to which network is theirs. Most of the networks require passwords. (I described our access control scheme some weeks ago.) There are some uninspired names (“Jane’s Wireless”) but some which must be unique to this area—“best internet evah”, for example, and “Red_Sox_Nation”.

I finally got a new base station, which supports both a password/encryption protocol we can all use, and allows me to add USB disk drives to the network as well. For the time being, while I break it in, we have two wireless networks, so I couldn’t use the same network name. Perhaps influenced by the fact that I’ve had mail solicitations from both Alley Cat Allies and Alley Cat Rescue in the past few weeks, I opted for “Brown Tiger Support Network”.

None of this, however, excuses the fact that I had a shiny new wireless base station in the apartment, still shrink-wrapped, for over a week before I got around to installing it. You’d think I was ill, or something.

Now Playing: Battle of Who Could Care Less from Whatever & Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five

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