laissez-faire wee-fee

By Mark Tennent in Reader

Posted in Security, Internet on July 1, 2010 at 4:33 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

We are just back from staying in an idyllic 13th century manor house in Le Mesnil Jourdain, Normandy. So much gite for so little money, Ikea meets antiques. And it even included “wee-fee if we could log onto the Negeer”, said the nice French lady.

With six feet of solid stone walls and fifty feet separating us from the Netgear router, we congregated round the windows, trying to make connections on our iPhones and lappies. In the end we found spots in the garden where the signal was strongest and shade from the blazing sun the deepest.

We eventually got a signal when the wind blew in the right direction. This air current being mainly goat farts as the whole manor house commune is surrounded by trebuchet-proof walls. Whereas goats roam the inner-fields, eating everything they can reach and only separated from us by strands of electric fencing.

What surprised us is the router’s wifi network is wide open, as is another’s nearby. When we left the commune and ventured further afield, we found many private routers are open for anyone to log on. In small French towns such as Louviers, where the only thing to do on Sunday is a down-market Tabac, a boulangerie or one of the few ‘Continental’ grocers, there are free public weefee networks as well as open private ones. At least in the town many had some form of access control.

We aren’t sure whether this laissez-faire attitude to Internet connection is by accident or just part of French life but it was very welcome.

Rated: 100% (3 votes)

 Loading ...

Previous Post

Make a comment

Name * required

Email * required

 

We stop spam using reCaptcha.
Type the words below and click Submit Comment.

 

pontum Snow Leopard Ron Wayne TNT EST Zune Telefonica FTP Apple iPhone Genuine Fractals Nano CS Suite EyeTV Quark Windows XP TomTom iPhone Smart Guides OpenCL CRB checks paperless bills Apple Newton Audio Books for Free Hotpoint Motorola Transmit GMT Muscadet Service menu Honfleur Seagate Barracudas gopher remote control iPod Civinfo Leopard WordService Netgear Safari 4 Suitcase Fusion EyeTV3 Elgato CYTV Andreas Junghans Bonjour O2 FourTrack 32- or 64- bit Kernel Startup Mode Selector Parexcel MarkWahlberg Back to My Mac Lewis Hamilton Bacchus Extensis Mac OS X 10.6 App Store Vidahost Tobias Meyerhoff Garmin Mosaic IBM French Resistance SoundSource Gil Amelio SimplyRAR PDF Spamhaus Steve Linford Spam CAN-SPAM Gennaro Contaldo HSBC Dr Who 1802 Coding Monkeys portforward Kate Beckinsale Apple Macintosh Cocoa Call of Duty Jim Kidwell Apple TV Rick Stein Growl Mike Spindler Linksys wifi 18185.co.uk anarchie insurance cellphone Western Digital MyBook Pro Port Map compression Joan of Arc CAPTCHA CyTV Lucidcake 'Andreas Junghans' Freehand CoPilot Phototshop Many Tricks software Linotype FontExplorer BST Siemens HP Simon Pinkerton Orange Adobe Flash 'Flash Cookies' Macromedia phpBB Apple Portable Elgato iPlayer Downloader Cisco Broadband Max Hamlet CalcService Fetch Firewire SuperDuper proxy server manager BBC iPlayer Media Player Lotus Kira Knightley Jamie Oliver pxl SmartScale Windows 7 FontDoctor Honda Civic broadband speed encryption The 88 BT iPad Mini Service Scrubber iChat 1Password ClamXav Panic Inc MacWorld magazine Mighty Mouse web browsers Safari-tweaks Claris HomePage Michael Mann LaserWriter Steve Jobs Dell Studio Hybrid Ofcom iPlayer SETI onOne Software Helen Mirren Apple Suitcase Fusion 2 Time zones FileMaker WordPress atvFlash Coffee break French ADSL2+ 'Library of Congress' 'digital images' 'Image Engineering' 'Matthew Brady' photography 'Samuel Morse' broadband unilities Logmein Markzware Adobe PageMill vBulletin Mike Markkola 21CN Hat Full of Sky Jonathan Ives uplink BT Connect Andrew Tomazos MacWorld Expo Maggie Thatcher Apple Cube Mac OS X France Telecom Fatboy iPod Aquiss TV and Video MacBook Air Logmein for the iPhone Apple Mac Mini Rogue Amoeba spy satellite images Macromedia Lotus Notes MacBook Mac Pro Logmein Ignition Moondrop to Gascony Gauloise font manager softwear Apple iMac satnav Public Enemies MacPro BT Central Pipes entertainment industry Cheltenham and Gloucester Andrew Potts Time Capsule 20CN Anarchy Dell CoPilot Live QuarkXPress iPad Phil Schiller Carbonized AppleTV Moho Books Bellhop British Telecom Government Xendai PC Tools iAntiVirus Mac OS X Services Entanet Optiplex veronica Napster iTunes Linotype FontExplorer Pro SpeedMail ADSL Q2ID Lawrence Dudley FontAgent Pro Gestapo Acrobat Adobe EDS Insider Software

• July 2010
• June 2010
• May 2010
• April 2010
• March 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006