whoa. the following
scenario
, which illustrates one possible future if public wlan’s become ubiquitous, might possibly be a corporation’s worst nightmare:
“Last time I was at the IETF, in Pittsburgh, Marconi was running the show and gave everyone 802.11 cards. I plugged mine into my notebook and fired up my Ethernet sniffer, which collected approximately 700+ webmail username/password pairs, over 100 POP logins, a good littering of telnet logins, a bunch of tunneled CIFS logins, and other assorted good stuff. Enough to crack into a user account at a large portion of the represented telco R&D firms. What I learned at IETF that year: the telecommunications world was still too stupid to be allowed to own wireless ethernet.
That was the IETF. This is an airport. IPSEC? Nah. It’s easier to jail the occasional teenager for “sniffing” than it is to actually fix the problem.”