Emergent Chaos

I see this constantly, but it is always an ad hoc network, not an AP.

At first, I thought it was somebody trying to sucker me into connecting. However, I seem to recall reading that "a certain operating system" will remember the last network to which it was connected, and advertise an ad hoc connection under the same name in this manner.

Google just provided these handy references:

http://www.nmrc.org/pub/advise/20060114.txt
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/free_public_wif.html

This is a MSFT issue. Simple Nomad did some research on this. It seems that if you bring up a Windoze laptop where there are no networks for it to connect to, it creates a computer-to-computer network with the SSID of the last thing it was connected to.

Nomad did an amusing job of showing how you could set up your own place for it to connect into, and then hack the people.

If we only knew some security-minded people at MSFT, maybe they could track down the right people to fix it.

This is a known problem to just about anybody doing wireless security... the best part is the "viral" nature, as some stations might automatically associate to an ad hoc network, change their "default" SSID, and then re-use when in a different location.

I saw this on a daily basis when I was doing wireless detection and such at a previous job.

It's the snakes you should be really worried out.