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Stop WiFi Drive BysThe Annoyance:My home wireless network has been acting funky and some of the settings seem to be changed. What's going on? The Fix:You could be a victim of drive-by hacking. Freeloaders may be taking a joyride on your home network, accessing the Net via your wireless connection or worse, pawing through your system. Keep in mind that a WiFi setup uses radio signals to broadcast data up to 500 feet from the router, which means a network you set up in your home office can easily extend into the street outside your house. In fact, seeking out unprotected WiFi networks called wardriving has become a favorite pastime of some geeks (see http://www.wardriving.com). A recent survey of some 225,000 home WiFi networks by WorldWideWardrive.com found more than 60 percent were completely wide open. Talk about an entrèe for freeloaders and hackers! Aside from tightwad neighbors sucking up your Internet bandwidth, you could be a sitting duck for anyone who wants to troll your hard drive for juicy information. Even if your PC is protected with a firewall, somebody could use your LAN to send out malware-laden email or download kiddie porn and it will be you the Feds are chasing, not the bad guys. To find out if your WiFi network is open, download the free Net Stumbler (http://www.netstumbler.com) and run a scan (see Figure 2-4). If your network is unprotected, it will be listed with a green light next to it. (Secure networks have green lights with locks inside). Odds are you're giving the neighbors a free ride. (For tips on how to secure your WiFi network, see the sidebar "WiFi Tiki Tavi.") annoyances 2-4. NetStumbler is a handy (and free) tool for finding WiFi networks in your vicinity and seeing which ones are wide open and easy to access. (Make sure yours isn't one of them.)![]() Share and Unshare AlikeThe Annoyance:I want to share some folders on my PC with other folks connected to my home network. But I definitely do not want to share all of them. How do I pick and choose? The Fix:To its credit, Windows XP ships with file and folder sharing turned off by default. With sharing turned on, anyone connected to your network can peer inside your files. (This led to a huge privacy snafu for the first cable broadband users, who were essentially connected to a neighborhood-wide local area network, which made it easy for neighbors to snoop at will inside anyone's shared folders.) XP makes it fairly easy to share document folders across your network. Open Windows Explorer or My Computer, right-click the folder you want to share, select Sharing and Security, and then check the "Share this folder on the network" box to allow other folks on your network to read (but not edit) documents inside that folder. To let people edit your stuff, check the "Allow network users to change my files" box. When you're done, click OK. To share individual files, drag the file into your shared documents folder (usually called "My Shared Documents"), and then change the settings of the folder as outlined above to make it available on the network. With Mac OS X, you can share files and folders by dragging them into your Public folder and turning on file sharing (open System Preferences, select Internet & Network Remember, if you have a WiFi network, follow the security measures outlined in the "WiFi Tiki Tavi" sidebar, or you could be sharing files with any snoop who passes by. My advice? When in doubt, make sure file and folder sharing is turned off and make My Documents (or whatever folders you store data files in) private. (For tips on how to do this, see the "Foil Hard Disk Snoops" sidebar.)
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