That's bad advice. Not broadcasting the SSID provides no real protection. All you have to do is sniff a few packets, and you'll get the SSID, despite turning off the broadcast packets.
I said for residential purposes. Very few people in a residential area have either the interest or the ability to drive around with a wireless packet sniffer. Fewer people would fail to notice someone parked outside their house for hours on end and someone with decent maintenance of their network would notice in their firewall logs eventually if a neighbor was leeching.
It's not bad advice, it's 95% better than what most average users do. They take it out of the box, plug it in, if their device finds it they are happy and never give a second thought to the unencrypted default SSID and admin password wireless router they just put online.
Anybody who is naive enough to take your bad advice on this subject will probably not be checking their firewall logs. Just changing the SSID and setting it to not broadcast buys you nothing. Simple as that. Your network is still open. Your packets are still in the clear. You have no way to authenticate who/what is connecting to your network. Even if the vast majority of bad guys won't be targeting the residential areas, the one who does (and it only takes one!) will be able to connect up in seconds and do what they want. They won't need to sit outside the house for hours. The damage can be done immediately, if your advice is followed.
Besides, if someone's going to take the 2 minutes to turn off the SSID broadcast, why not take the extra 10 seconds to turn on the encryption?
Because the wii doesn't always work with the encryption on...... nuff said, end of story, thanks for playing.
I don't think I'm alone here by saying that pretty much the only thing I use my wireless connection for is my wii. All of my other devices are hard-wired to my network. The only reason my wii isn't is because the usb adaptors cost around 30-40 bucks and I just bought a wireless router instead, saved myself a couple of bucks and have given myself the ability to add other wireless devices later on.
Looking at your advice I am reminded of the phrase:
"Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
That is very true, but by being paranoid all the time you are simply wasting away your life by looking over your shoulder. The thing is if "they" want to "get you" they will and there is nothing you can do about it so sometimes it's best just to weigh in the cost/benefit of the task at hand. In this case I can't see a person going around trying to find a router that'll work with the wii with encryption enabled considering encryption is rather useless and in most cases nobody is gonna be sniffing around your network anyway.
I don't know if you've ever been "war driving" before, but it does indeed take quite a while. Yes once you've found the signal it is pretty easy to connect, but you have to find the signal. In theory wifi can transmit around 3 miles, in practice however it transmits only a few yards. Even if you have a very hi-gain recieving antenna you still have to transmit, and since the host router doesn't have a fancy antenna hooked to it, even with your boosted transmission signal a reliable, stable connection is often sketchy at best. So taking that into account, just to connect and say visit a site would take 5-10 minutes once a proper direction is locked in and on top of that at least 30-40 min of some guy screwing around with a directional antenna while the driver cruises around at a cool 5 -10 mph. Trust me, if somebody is trying to snarf access in your hood, somebody will notice.
And remember the user doesn't have to be aware of firewall logs and such, just the person that works on their pc does. If someone is constantly stealing your access then your local tech head will investigate and find the cause, likewise if somebody does something illegal on your network.
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Topic: Trouble getting Wii online (Read 7688 times)
