Just because I love you guys so much, a few words for those who are concerned w/ wireless security (if you don't care if anyone can potentially access stuff on your pc/stuff you're sending across the interwebs, ignore):
- Verizon built-in wireless routers: as of right now, they are all encrypted using WEP (something like an 8-13 random letter/digit password). This is extremely weak & easy to break. Once someone breaks into it, they can potentially cause all sorts of bad things. In the best case, they just use up your bandwidth; in the worse case, they are dumping the contents of your hdd into their pc & monitoring the sites you go to, your IM conversations, and your forums.solo2.com posts, lol.
- WPA/WPA2 is better. However, if you choose something like an 8 letter word that happens to be a dictionary word (English or otherwise) or some variation of a dictionary word (numbers instead of letters), it cancels out the advantage WPA has over WEP & is actually even easier to crack...
- Of course, choosing some crazy 64 random character setup like John may be a little overboard (but essentially "impossible" to crack... and probably a pain to log into, haha).
I did a class project on the above WEP/WPA issues & network penetration was achievable in literally minutes - took a little while to research, but I had no prior network security training prior to this; i.e. your neighbor's high school emo teen can probably reproduce the steps I did.
- My suggestion would be to use a combination of words or numbers that make sense to you but is not obvious to "the general public".
It's unlikely that your wireless network will be compromised, but it's not much more "work" to make your wifi setup more secure.
That being said, Eric - if you have issues w/ setting up your wireless network, just let me know @ the next championship
This has been a public service announcement...