Anyone can get their kicks on Route 66 - but on Highway 101, you can get Wi-Fi in 77 places.
At least that's how many wireless networks USA TODAY found while driving the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We hunted for networks from a moving car using a wireless-enabled laptop and standard Microsoft Wi-Fi software, which is part of Windows.
Wi-Fi signals usually travel only about a city block, so we expected to pick up only networks that are very close to the freeway. And we expected to miss some of those, because trees, hills, buildings and other obstructions can block Wi-Fi signals. (That might explain why we found fewer networks in hilly San Francisco than in flat L.A.) Our technique would work on any highway in America.
Our 440-mile journey turned up networks in surprising places - and some surprisingly lax security.
What we found:
?Most Wi-Fi networks are private. Some Wi-Fi networks, such as those in coffee shops, airports and hotels, are designed for anyone to use. But most of the ones we saw appeared to be private networks from homes and businesses. (It's often tough to tell exactly where a Wi-Fi signal originates.)
We saw a cluster of networks near high-rise apartments in San Francisco's hip South of Market neighborhood, for example. Others popped up near the Silicon Valley office parks that are home to tech giants Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
These networks were probably set up for internal use only. But there's almost no way to keep a Wi-Fi signal - which travels via radio wave - contained inside a building.
?A private Wi-Fi network might still be open. Although no one can control where a Wi-Fi signal goes, basic security precautions can keep the public from logging on. A surprising number of networks didn't have them.
To test, we stopped in downtown Los Angeles. Among the 31 networks we found along one block, only 13 required a password, or network key, to log on. That's one of the most rudimentary Wi-Fi security features.
Two networks - one from a Starbucks and one from the L.A. Public Library - were designed to be open to the public. The other 16 appeared to be private but required no password. Three were so open we easily hopped onto their connections, borrowing their Internet service to surf the Web and send e-mail. Had we more devious intentions, we could have used the network to try to hack into internal corporate files.
?Wi-Fi is found mainly in high-tech, urban areas - but not always. Not surprisingly, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles had the most Wi-Fi networks. Clusters also popped up near California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo and the University of California-Santa Barbara.
But one network appeared in the middle of farmland, just north of the small town of Salinas. Another popped up near the farming town of Gonzales, population 8,275.
And a third appeared on a picturesque stretch of beachfront highway occupied only by a restaurant, sheep and surfers.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=677&ncid=677&e=4&u=/usatoday/20040329/bs_usatoday/wifisignalsturnupinsomeunexpectedplaces
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