FW: Unsecured wifi might be contributory negligence

Tom Thomson colinthomson1 at o2.co.uk
Mon Feb 20 08:01:54 GMT 2012


In reply to: 19 February 2012 20:22 Ian Batten
> 
> Because the first mass-market integrated WiFi solution was the Intel 2100
> MiniPCI card, which was released in late 2002.  That does WPA2 with
> Windows XP SP3.   There's a Broadcom card of a similar vintage, that also
> does WPA2 with up-to-date drivers.    Prior to the MiniPCI cards, you
> needed to use PCMCIA cards.   I don't believe that laptops were being
> purchased as consumer items in 2002, and especially not with PCMCIA
> cards to add wireless.  If there are such machines in circulation --- and we're
> both guessing --- then PCMCIA cards that will do WPA2 are dirt cheap and
> could be provided by the ISP as part of the programme.
> 
> There might be, somewhere, a laptop still in use which has an on-board WiFi
> adapter which will not do WPA2, but which also does not have a PCMCIA
> slot, although such beasts would have been rare even when new: I've never
> seen one (G4 iBooks do WPA2; G3 ones might not, but how many of those
> are still in use?)   But I seriously doubt any of this stuff is in use by civilians.

Surely the capabilities of laptops are a bit irrelevant given that routers without WPA (let alone WPA2) capability continued to be shipped for quite a bit longer and router replacement tends to be rather rarer than laptop replacement (and if there are UK ISPs who do things the way Telefonica does, there are also routers where the hardware has the capability but they are running firmware that doesn't).

M.







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