For the first time ever I’m blogging from my backyard on my deck. I should really take advantage of the freedom of wireless more often. I’ve setup one of the long range wireless bridges we use at work, and I’m getting full signal strength in my backyard. Even through the brick walls of my house! These things are pretty powerful. I should test one at Red Wood sometime to see if one shot can reach the whole building. I kind of wonder if it’s safe to use this bridge in my house, since normally we use them for point to point distance shots. Oh well. The proverb of wireless is, “Talk quietly, listen loud.” Boosting the signal of your AP only amplifies the surrounding noise, so it’s better to listen louder.
To protect my wireless, I don’t really use encryption. Haven’t bothered to set it up yet, but I probably will eventually. What I do is I don’t broadcast the SSID, which is probably the best thing you can really do. And to make things even more difficult I setup MAC address filtering on the AP, which means that only my wireless NIC can associate with the AP. I’m sure that if someone really went through the trouble they could build some sort of sniffer that reads the signals being broadcast since I don’t use encryption, but if they really were willing to go through that much trouble to hack my data I’m sure they’d be able to do it anyway. One day I’ll setup a VPN.
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