Hi all,
I think I can answer this one..... That Starbucks doesn't have WLAN...
(There's a checker on their website) however in George street on a
recent warwalking excercise to test out my new shiny Linux based
handheld (Sharp Zaurus C860) I found 22 WLAN networks in George Street
alone, 9 of which had no WEP enabled!!
The fact that the SSID started belkin, it sounds like someone just
plonked it on their LAN with no config at all, not a good idea (tm)
On your questions....
1. Interesting from a Legal standpoint (IANAL BTW) the fact that there
were no banners or other messages telling you it was private and that
you were in a public place would probably be in your favour. that
said I wouldn't make a habit of connecting to that LAN if I were you,
as it could well be some companies internal network (albeit a poorly
configured one)
2. Nope and as you surmised, I won't be t-mobile (all the SSID's that
I've seen for their hotspots are "tmobile", other hotspots are
"eurospot" or "mycloud" (although it occurs to me that anyone could
set their SSID's to those ones, so it's probably best to go by
physical signs that there is a hotpose in a given location"
cheers
Rory
Blog: www.nmrcon.net
Philip Nelson wrote:
... yes really !!!
At lunchtime today I had to make a trip into the centre of Edinburgh
for a visit to Jenners.
Being slightly peckish, and knowing that some Starbucks now have
wireless access (T-Mobile) at a cost, I went into the one on the
corner of Hanover Street and George Street (the one that used to be a
travel agent).
There was no indication that wireless service was available. But I
had a couple of things to do on the trusty old laptop even without
internet access, so I fired up SuSE 9 (with my wireless card in the
PCMCIA slot).
I decided to try the Internet even although there was no indication
of any hotspot. So I opened Konqueror, typed in www.lwn.net and ...
No login screen for T-Mobile, depending a user ID / password or money.
Instead the requested web page displayed straight away. Opened up
Kmail and, sure enough, email was also working.
Thinks ... is T-Mobile having a free day because of the holiday. I
doubted it. So open up Konsole, su to root and type "iwconfig".
Sure enough the ESSID isnt "tmobile" but "belkin56g". Someone's home
wireless network ? Or part of a community project ?
Whatever I enjoyed half an hour of surfing, applied the latest
patches to SuSE and got my email.
Questions :
1) Have I done anything wrong ? If not I can see this location
getting the benefit of my custom on a frequent basis, given that
T-Mobile have just changed their pricing structure to make access on
a regular basis very expensive.
2) Does anyone know whose network I was connected through ?
Phil
-
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can find the EdLUG mailing list FAQ list at:
http://www.edlug.org.uk/list_faq.html