OT? Can my neiighbor, whose wifi I'm using, see what I'm doing?

Here most people protect their wifi with a password, so you can not borrow it. Sometimes I am at a flat with dozens of WiFis around, none open.

This is not actually intentional, it is that now the free ISP routers come already protected.

Welcome.

Here too but this guy must be an exception, just when I needed one.

On a prior occasion decades ago, when I'd just gotten a laptop and I was to leave on a translatlantic trip the next day, then too I ended up using the next door neighbor's wifi, a different person then, and I was lucky because a lot of stuff had to be put into the laptop before I left. I don't remember why mine didn't work. Maybe I only had DSL then and his was faster.

I think mine had a password. His was Comcast's other name, which escapes me right now.

I made a mistake not changing the password to something I could remember. they have to use one that no other subscriber to Verizon has. I'd only have to use one that no other neighbor had and no one around could guess, or use software to find. Didn't know how many times I'd have to enter it, the printer, the cell phone, the next cell phone, a TV, Alexa maybe, and a couple other things I didn't forexee and don't rmeember. I should have made it shorter and easier.

micky snipped-for-privacy@fmguy.com wrote: [...]

You're mixing up passwords.

There are two passwords: 1) The one to access the web UI of the modem/router and 2) the password for your WiFi network.

I'm sure almost everyone knows the two credentials, but I'm not sure if the OP is aware of the differences between them...

1. The admin "password" to the router is sometimes (often?) limited to 8 characters (at least it is on some of my older Netgear routers) and it may require uppercase,lowercase & funky characters (as my Netgear routers require), so you're limited in your choices.
2. The SSID "passphrase" to the access point, can be 8?63 characters for WPA2/WPA3, which can be resistant to brute-force attacks.

I suspect most people aren't aware of oublic rainblow hash tables, which take advantage of the fact that WPA2 uses PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) with HMAC-SHA1 to stretch the passphrase into a

They're only effective if the attacker can guess the SSID, because the SSID is part of the salt in WPA2 key derivation. That's why you want your SSID not to show up in a dictionary lookup, as then you have no AP security.

WPA3's SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) protocol makes those tables obsolete, but for most of us, what all this means is we should simply choose an SSID that isn't found in typical dictionary lookup tables.

Something like "gibberis_plus_more_gibberish_optout_nomap" for example.