Most new computers are equipped for wireless Internet access, and more and more people opting for Wi-Fi in their homes. But as the networks become stronger and more prevalent, more of those signals are available outside the home of the subscriber, spilling over into neighbor's apartments, hallways and the street.
Yeah, we've heard all the stories and the pending lawsuits, and the media loves to go into "Ooh, It's a Big Scary Internet" mode as if they were Count Floyd; the media just loves to go out of its way to make people scared of something. But you know what? This is going to be a non-issue very soon, as security for WiFi networks gets better and easier to implement. (On the Mac, it's extremely simple to password-encode one's WiFi network. In fact, with the last few versions of Airport, you can't not password-encode it.) It may even become a mooter (is that a word?) issue: it's not hard to imagine a time when most of the U.S., or even the world, is a big wireless hotspot, making the question "Whose network is it?" a pointless one.
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