Heh, exactly my thoughts after last night's BCS lecture on Wireless Networking. I tell you, anyone who had sat through that would not use a wireless network unless wired really wasn't an option. Only WPA2 (not readily available) is anything like secure. I watched WEP being cracked live - one laptop performing deauth attacks while the other captured packets and by the end of the lecture there were enough for a brute forcer to get the key in under a second.

WPA1 can be done, all it takes is a little more time. MAC address spoofing is as easy as pie and people had made tubes with pringles cartons to demonstrate wardriving. For all the wireless wonder, the contraptions set up for demonstration still seemed to have an awful lot of wires and to get anything like a decent signal in difficult buildings, it seems you need a £450 cisco router.

It sounded a real pain going round your house with a laptop running software to suss out the signal loss (and there will be some). We were given a talk on refraction, deflection and two more terms I can't even remember which describe what can happen to an RF signal in the attempt to set up a wireless hotspot, when the signal hits various materials.

Honestly, it made me glad my own setup is wired!