You have now been introduced to John Hancock. He is among the millions of people each year who now use the comforts and benefits of wireless networking to ease his life. You may already know him, or someone like him. He has a high speed internet connection at home, purchases a new laptop, and decides to take advantage of the wireless technology. Along with being able to use his new laptop wirelessly at home in any room or outside, he can also take it to places such as airports, restaurants, and "wifi hotspots" and use wireless to search the internet and read email.
Although with the comforts, there are also insecurities. The insecurities are in the local wireless network itself.
In the first article - Wireless Networking - At What Cost? - John took his wireless router out of the box, and was able to plug it in and then use it with a minimal number of steps. The quick and basic configurations were used to get it up and going so he could use the connection fast and easy. He did not need to know anything about security, MAC address filters, WEP, WPA, channels, signal strength or SSID’s (Other than to give a name to his wireless network). It was fast and easy. Within 10 minutes, he had the wireless part of his network working.
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In the previous article, we met John Hancock who had just bought a new Dell
laptop from Circuit City. He also bought a wireless router and sat outside purchasing a new domain name from Godaddy.com. Enjoying the freedom of the wireless technology, John sat outside in his lounge chair and also purchased a place to host email and a new website he is going to build.
You might have noticed that John did look for the "HTTPS" instead of the "HTTP" when he made a secure transaction. This is a good thing! Kudos to John for remembering to do that. The extra "S" in the URL stands for "Secure" meaning he is making his transaction with a credit card over a secure site. This will prevent anyone else from seeing the credit card numbers on the website (Basically).
John also got a pretty good deal on the Dell laptop from Circuit City. The wireless router was not a bad price either. John can add a few more points to his "shopping karma". Godaddy.com also has some of the lowest prices around for domain registration. Way to go John!
Now, aside for saving money with those purchases, John actually did make some mistakes that could cost him in the long run. The mistakes were not due to the purchases he made. They were due to the technology he is using.
As convenient as wireless networking is, he was not aware of a few things. Namely, how insecure wireless technology can be.
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GirlGeekteete dotNet Tags: dell, domain name, host, hosts, circuit city, website, email, hosting, credit card, secure, security, insecure, technology, wireless, firewall, antivirus, protection, laptop, computer, pc
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