public wifi that uses ad-hoc?
or these viral free networks?

maybe i shouldn't have dug up this thread

Sorry, I guess it was a pretty obscure comment. I've seen Free Public Wifi that wasn't actually operative in several places in LA. I know it was hard to figure out that it was actually the topic referred to in the title of the thread. I've see the hpsetup one lots, too.

When I first powered up my N800 at the office, I saw quite a few of these adhoc "replay" signals. They were coming from client laptop computers which supposed were "locked down" by their IT group.

The strangest one that I saw was "Columbia Business & Law School". "Free Public Wifi" and "hpsetup" are the most common.

I'm glad that in OS2008 they changed the icon to something a little more recognizable to distinguish between infrastructure and adhoc networks. The icons in OS2007 were very difficult to tell the difference!

I have seen both here in southern Oregon, but I also run into another one that has good signal but no ssid. The weird thing is I run into it in places where there shouldn't be any wifi, like in the mountains around my town. BTW, you can't connect to this one either. I only see this on the N800 not on my iBook.

I never knew what this was. Everytime my phone does a search Free Public WiFi shows up with a strong signal as well as a connection called google and im located in Maryland????? Neither work when you connect to them but now I see they are useless. At first I thought it was the state wide WiFi service that Clearwire is going to be rolling out shortly but guess I was wrong.

Sorry to bring out this old thread... is this 'viral' effect a property of the Maemo system as well? I was traveling and accidentally clicked on two ad-hoc networks, "hpsetup" and "linksys" (I'm an idiot, I know!)... anyways, for the next week I kept seeing these networks in my list as available, before I realized that these were ad-hoc networks that i clicked on at the airport. I had been carrying them with me on my N900. When I was searching, these networks were green, and I clicked on the linksys one again one time at work.

My question, did other people around me see these ad-hoc networks from my device? When I was searching, would they have appeared to other people? When I clicked on the 'linksys' adhoc network, would it have appeared to other people then?

Sounds like the windows fix was not to remember the adhoc network. Since my Maemo device remembered the ad-hoc networks... well, isn't that how this 'viral phenomena' starts?

Just curious, trying to understand this... thanks!

Could you tell me which icon is which?

The ad-hoc network icon has a dot above the waves at the top.

My N900 took a major battery hit from one of these FreePublicWiFi adhocs at South Station Amtrack terminal in Boston Massachusetts. I was looking at a sign which made plain that the train station had free WiFi and thought that was the correct one (with a name like FreePublicWiFi who wouldn't?) so I attempted to connect. The station then announce my train's track number and I forgot about the wifi. Three hours later my battery was dead because the N900 continued to try and sign in or an attempted attack from that "host" continued while the phone was in my pocket. This continued after recharging (another 3 hour battery life) until I went into Settings - Internet Connections - Connections and then selected the troublemaker SSID and deleted it. Battery life back to 16 hours now.