Another Round with the Whisher Folks
I will give points to the folks from Whisher, who seem to be taking a bigger interest in what punters like me have to say than FON is. This time around, I’m not going to respond to each point they brought up, just a couple that are worth bringing up:
- The Fonera does support dual SSIDs, and you can indeed tag your public, non-encrypted SSID and share your private SSID with Whisher. We are not either or with Fon, but rather ‘on top of’. We require WEP/WPA to register an AP, but you can tag any open one.
Tagging is useful, though one wonders how you differentiate from, say, a “linksys” SSID at one location versus a “linksys” SSID at a completely different location. I suppose you can also store the MAC address of the unit.
- Regarding dual SSIDs, security – your case is special, and please don’t tell me that the average Joe will follow your setup. I agree it’s the best in terms of security, and we actively promote and encourage that, but our target user is the übergeek -and- the regular user.
I’m not just an über-geek, I am a paranoid bastard über-geek, thank you very much. Comes from years of having to support Check Point VPN-1. 
I acknowledge the average person wouldn’t go through what I go through. I have firewalls within my network.
That being said, I think the dual SSID thing is likely good enough for the vast majority of people out there, provided it is implemented correctly (with a firewall) between the two SSIDs.
- We are working on documents to help out users in these topics, such as increasing security and taking precautions, and your suggestions to promote WPA are right and welcome. I have been involved in wardriving since the early stages, promoting exactly this sort of thing (I wrote StumbVerter, and co-authored ‘Wardriving: Drive, Detect, Defend’ –shameless plug!).
The trick is, explaining it to them in words they can understand. I might suggest borrowing a couple of pages from Steve Gibson, who did a reasonable job explaining all this stuff on the Security Now! podcasts.
