RE: Wifi hot spots - 'not secure'

pgut001 reflector wrote:
> If it’s this hard to explain to geeks, imagine
> getting it across to average users.

It might be a lot easier – average users have a lot less to unlearn than geeks.

I will always remember one geek who had learnt, when attending an 
information theory course, the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.  He 
and was utterly convinced as a result that it was impossible to get 
more than 2B bits per second out of a channel with bandwidth B.  I 
tried to explain that the Nyquist rate was a signalling rate, not a 
data transmission rate, that the signalling limit was 2B baud, not 2B 
bits per second, and that 1 baud is not 1 bit per second;  but this 
had not the slightest effect, no amount of explanation could convince 
him he was wrong – Claude Shannon was an eminent authority and 
therefore his interpretation must be right (it always amuses me how 
often a geek will have completely misunderstood the eminent authority 
to whom he appeals to support his nonsense; they are almost as bad as 
politicians in this respect). Even pointing out that this same eminent 
authority, Claude Shannon, was responsible for the Shannon-Hartley 
theorem which clearly contradicted his conclusion had no effect 
(presumably his information theory course hadn’t got that far).  Nor, some time (?years?) later, did
pointing out that the post office had 
just announced a shiny new 9.6kb/s modem to operate over its 4kHz 
bandwidth phone lines, and 9.6/4 is a little larger than 2 - he 
claimed that that must all be being done by clever compression. I 
imagine he still believes that the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem 
provides a limit on data transmission rates.  

I can’t imagine ever having that sort of problem with a non-geek.