A great idea I think for improving security

My neighbours next door have a dlink access point which is set to factory defaults. they are not tech savvy and i could easily connect to their network and use their internet connection at will - if i so desired.

the only way they would know i was on the network was looking at the DHCP table on the access point (impossible given their lack of techspertise) or they could do a scan of the subnet by doing a broadcast ping or using a subnet scanner.

again this is unlikey given their level of knowledge.

so how about an LCD display on the access point which tells them how many clients are connected and updates with an audible and visual signal when a new client connects ?

just a thought,

Reply to
sam1967
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every one ? all 100 million wireless users ? do you think that is a job for one man ?

my neighbours are merely illustratory of the wider issue.

Reply to
sam1967

Actually, not a bad idea. I was thinking of some kind of similar display for coffee shop hot spots. I ranted on the subject a while back but am too lazy to google for the posting. Detecting new connections could be done by sniffing the ethernet traffic, but that's too much hardware and software to do the job. There are also software products that currently do just that.

What I was thinking is adding yet another feature to the common WRT54G Linux based router which would generate some kind of indication. At its crudest form, it would flash the lights on the front panel. At best, there would be an external LCD display, connected to the JTAG port, which would display number of connections, traffic rate, ping times, internet weather, position of the moon, whatever. For example:

formatting link
new crop of serial LCD panels are easy to interface. The software is not much more than grep of the netstat output piped to word count. The only obvious problems I can see immediately are:

  1. You have to destroy your access point to do this.
  2. It would raise the cost of the AP substantially.
  3. People still tend to ignore small status displays.
  4. It's a great solution looking for a problem worth solving.

Argh... I'm late.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Or... how about helping them to enable security on their access point???

Bob

Reply to
Bob Alston

As a concept fine but why bother? If security was such that you were limiting it directly then there's no need for any sort of display.

This is the whole area where wireless is muddled, various forms of encryption, various forms of authentication, not all are compatible such that you end up at the weakest once again which is no security or WEP which is also no security or WPA which could be weak security depending on strength of key chosen but the weak point there is the human interface which isn't compatible with strong keys.

David.

Reply to
David Taylor

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