Currently on holiday in the Czech Republic as another post of mine says, on switching on my laptop to show photos I noticed that a wireless network had been detected. Intrigued that a wireless network even existed - as I'm in somewhat of a rural backwater - I looked further and noticed the SSID (network name) to be that of a neighbour a fair distance up the street. His house is made of wood and my laptop had clear line of site through a window, so I guess this explains why I could see his service over such a distance.
Anyway, he has no security so I committed the heinous crime of connecting to get the Monaco F1 GP result.
Since then, as my other post also testifies, over the past few days I have been helping friends who live in the same street to get wirelessly enabled by configuring my old Netgear wifi router for them.
In due course, conversation during this activity turned to me explaining all the good things mentioned above and citing Mr X as an example of lax practice and potential crime implications.
"Oh, we know about lax security" came the retort from teenagers x2!
"How come?" says I
The answer was that son junior has a wifi enabled Ericsson phone and browses the web courtesy of Mr X whilst he's having a dump, this being the only seat in the house that gives a signal!
As an aside, pinging BBC gives a response time faster than I get from deepest Warks in the UK, even though I am in ever deeper Moravia at the moment, much further away from the local ADSL exchange. The benefit of few users and low contention ratios I assume!