MountainPro said:cheers david, i a not too concerned abot parental controls or anything like that but i must admit, i read a similar thread on here recenely (possible newsgroup topic) that discussed how easy it was for people on a nearby wireless network to hack in and use your bandwidth...i.e. to log onto your internet account using thier network..
how easy would this be?
There are 2 ways to handle that. The first is to use WEP encryption. This is a fancy term which means security for wireless networks. All devices on your wireless network must have the same 4 keys set as their WEP encryption. Other devices outside your wireless network that do not know your WEP encryption keys will not be able to log onto your network. The data that you transmit on the network is also encrypted protecting things like credit card numbers. Its not fool proof, but will restrict the non-hackers. It will stop the typical neighbor who sees your network from being able to access it. As far as the data protection goes though its basically useless, as anyone who is going to the trouble of intercepting your wireless traffic to decode it to get at your data will likely know how to defeat the encryption as well.
The 2nd is to use MAC address filtering. A MAC address is like an ID for each network card and they are unique. You basically tell the router to only allow access to MAC addresses of your machines. This is a much higher level security for logging on to your network to use your bandwidth, but it does nothing for interception and security of your data.
I good gateway/router will have software which lets you set all of this up easily. Mine will show me the MAC adresses of all machines on the network and I simply enter them into a list of allowed machines and your done. Unless you change a network card, the MAC addresses stay the same. The WEP encryption is a little more complicated as you have to set the keys on the router and then go around to each computer and set the same keys up on those machines.
I use both, because I first was using WEP encryption and then added the MAC filtering later. Make sure the one you are buying will allow MAC filtering. I wouldn't be too alarmed about the data security, as anyone trying to intercept it is going to have to be very close and go to a lot of trouble to get at it.
