I'm being robbed

A while back I bought a new computer to put in my room so my room mate upgraded the modem on his pc and installed one that can emit a wireless signal that I pick up via a wireless usb dongle.

Thing is our bandwidth has been getting chewed up rather a lot lately so I went into connections and saw this:



The first connection is the one in the house, the second one must be further away since its weaker but its definitely not in the house. I'm picking up their signal with a weak little usb adapter so if they had a stronger receiver they'd probably be getting a very good signal from the internet in my place. I'd never noticed it before, so I'm sure its a someone who just recently set up wireless internet and while I can't prove who it is or what they are doing them showing up and my internet slowing down at the same time are suspicious.

However I can't steal this guys connection because it is password protected. So does anyone here know how I can set up a password of my own?

 

I think it's just another network you picked up, nothing to be concerned about. I live in a city and get about a dozen of these, passworded or not, signal good or bad.

Chances are, you're getting crappy performence because of the poor quality of your USB dongle (does it even have an external antenna?), but it looks to you as if the network was under heavy load. I'm quite sure there's a way to check who and when connects to your network via the modem's web interface, but you'll have to bug your freind about that.

As for setting up passwords - it has to be set up on the modem, then you enter it somewhere in the connection properies on your computer. Nothing too complicated, altough it gets worse with higher levels of security. But you should definately get a password.

 

The dongle isn't the issue, the main pc is getting slower internet as well.

But I'll give the rest of you ideas a go sometime later today.

 

From my experience, wireless networks seem to be more pain in the ass than they're worth at the moment. I know I had fun setting up a few home networks for people, entering passwords and wondering why some PCs would connect and others wouldn't, even though I'd done the same thing. Throw in a few new "dealing with Vista" quirks and in the end, cables consistently solved all the problems. Plug cable in, internet works. No speed issues, no disconnect issues, no "it tells me it's connected but why doesn't the internet work?" problems.

 

The thing is the cable would go through the main hallway and people would trip over it all day long.

Doesn't matter now anyways, the network is now so securely locked it took me 20 min to get back in with all the passwords. I'm sure someone who really wanted to would find a way in could, but at least now we aren't broadcasting free internet.

 

And how exactly could that be a bad thing?

 

It'd get torn out of my PC and mess up the network cable port.

Entertainment like that should be free, not require repairs to my personal property.

 

consider suspending the network cable at neck-height and using it to hang wet sweaty socks.

 

Drill a hole in the ceiling, shove the cable up there, get into the roof, drill a hole where you want it to come out, dump it through. That's how a real man would do it.

 

True.

But I'm not going out and buying a cordless drill and an overly long network cable to set up a connection that works over wireless anyway.

 

That reminds me of the school network that automatically installed McAfee on our laptops whenever we logged in on it. Bloody antivirus slowed down the 366 MHz machines beyond functionality and that's why we installed a firewall to shield ourselves from the pest.

Good times.

 

If so, they're responsible for my using Linux. Windows caught a bad case of Blaster or whatever and went FUBAR to the point that it wouldn't even start in failsafe. Enter Linux, and since then I haven't had any viral infections affecting any calculating device, but also the inability to play anything worth a damn.