travelling and cannot connect to many open unsecured wifi networks

Some of these are probably networks with MAC address filtering.

On 22 May 2006 00:04:13 -0700, "pstock" wrote: : I am travelling in Europe this month. as both an experiment in the : diffusion of wifi in the places I visit and as a means of staying in : touch and uploading photos etc., when I take a break from my bike, I : will usually pop open my laptop and check for wifi hotspots and see : which are Open/Unsecured and which are WEP locked. : In France about 85% were WEP locked (thanks to the national telecom's : efforts pushing their own router which I believe has WEP security : defaulted to ON.) : In Germany the locked rate seemed lower, but this is my first day. : : My question is this. Of the many Unsecured networks my WIndows XP : identifies, I have only been able to connect to I would say about 15% : of them. : I would have thought that any Unsecured network with a strong enough : signal should have allowed me to connect. but it isn't working out that : way. My system will either thrash away trying to connect before giving : up or, even once the access point is tagged as Automatic (and my : settings say "connect automatically"), it doesn't go into the Acquiring : IP Address. (or if it does, it often just jiggles back and forth and : never connects.) : : can anyone tell me why I might be getting this low success rate on : Unsecure networks or how I might connect more consistently?

The fact that a network tells you that it's open and unsecured doesn't mean that it is. It could be using 3rd-party encryption software that sits between the access point and the rest of the network (including, for example, the DHCP server). Unless you have the right client-side software and encryption key, your connectivity will be zilch.

Besides, access points have other methods of restricting connectivity (MAC address filtering, for example). The access points I've used don't tell an unsuccessful supplicant why he didn't get through. It's part of the security to be vague and uncommunicative about such things.

Being "vague and uncommunicative" that way doesn't really add to security. "Security by obscurity" is an oxymoron.