Here's a ridiculous article written by someone who was
a) on deadline
b) already drunk from Friday lunchtime
c) knowing nothing about WiFi

is the link, and the most salient part of the article was:
http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=30792

Relevant piece of the article:
"Conducted over a three-week period in this past February and March, the two
networks were set up in office locations away from any areas that were known
to have been discovered by hackers, who usually mark the location of any
wireless LAN network they find with so-called 'war-chalking' symbols. RSA
wasn't keen to divulge exactly where the networks were set up, but the
company's strategic marketing director, Tim Pickard, tells Unstrung that the
intent was to make them "a challenge to find."
Over the course of the experiment, the RSA networks were accessed on
twenty-nine different occasions, with one hacker casually spending 90
carefree minutes online. The first unauthorized connection  was made only
two hours and thirty-five minutes after the networks went live."
So -- let me get this right
a) they put open APs out there, presumably broacasting their SSIDs
b) people discovered them
c) people used them.
And this, apparently, was "hacking"  It kind of reminds me of the good old
days of the Web when anyone who could string together a couple of <form>s
and a spinning flaming logo could call themselves an HTML programmer.

The motivation for this piece of absurdity remains unclear until we learn
that the effort was sponsored by RSA Security whose job it is, surprisingly,
to provide system security software to... Wait for it... Networks. Well now
*there's* a surprising coincidence.

A moment's casual reflection (with a few beers in myself, courtesy of the
Chieftain, which I don't believe is WiFi enabled but which does a smashing
pie and beans) suggests that all of this was dreamed up by the sort of PR
drone/flack who gives the rest of us suits a bad name, this idea being
conceived whilst in the "tired and emotional" state following a session
highlighted in item (b) in the first para. Above.

Or perhaps I'm being churlish.

Cheers
-- dhk


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