Quote Originally Posted by Ynot View Post
same difference, really
I used my workplace just as a real life example

what are you afraid of, to make you secure your wireless?

People sitting outside your house downloading torrents, leaching all your bandwidth? - restrict the outgoing ports on the unencrypted wireless - block anything except web & email (and anything else you want to grant them)

It doesn't have to be "all or nothing"

"Free for all" guest access for web & email
(means your mates can bring their laptop round and have no issues connecting)

Require authentication & encryption for anything else
(means you are free to do anything, on any port - plus it's encrypted, so no-one can snoop on your traffic)
This sounds like much more trouble then just putting a simple MAC filter and WEP key on your network. Sure it's still easily hackable, but only to other computer geeks. WPA is really what everyone should be doing, but it's a pain in the ass to get connected in linux to WPA.

In my apartment complex I can see roughly 15 networks, 3 are unencryped, 6 are WEP, and 6 are WPA. So I would say that most people are using encryption.