Saturday 2 February 2008

Pic of the day: Are you surfing porn? Not from my wireless network you aren't!

Network proliferation

I fired up the old computer again - the one from before the Monster which is now overheating from lack of fan and which was built by a company that has finally folded after many years. Ironically, the old one is still running fine, just oh so slowly, and needing an external CD drive.

There are also now 4 other wireless networks here. I live on the very edge of suburbia, I have around that numbers of neighbors within easy walking distance. OK, a couple more. Which means there will probably be a couple more networks soon. Half of them are wide open.

In contrast, my home network doesn't even have its name visible, and is protected with a password even I have trouble remembering (a mixture of letters and digits). This may be overkill now that I think about it. The thing is, I don't really mind if my neighbors use some of my bandwidth or watch my anime, I just don't want them to see pictures of my LJ friends without clothes and read my mail, stuff like that. Strange things come onto my hard disk at times, sometimes by surprise. I guess I could password-protect the parts I don't want anyone to see and keep other parts open, but it is simpler for me to just close it off. I have poked around in the folders and read various help files but I cannot find a way to password protect certain resources on a network in Windows XP. I am pretty sure I could (and did) in Windows ME, and I am convinced I saw it in Vista too. Anyway, I really doubt the neighbors will miss my Internet connection when they have their own, and unfortunately for them they will probably not miss my anime collection either.