Who didn’t know this?

12% of consumers are leeching wireless from unsecured wireless networks.

Hello!? How can you possibly hop on the internet and not realize that people do this? There’s a very simple solution to this problem. It’s called “Network Filtering”. I’m not the huge network geek that my husband and friends are, but Network Filtering is really easy to do and from what I’ve seen, any wireless router has this feature available in its setup.

What you do is tell the wireless router to only accept connections from the mac addresses that belong to individual machines in your house (or your Nintendo DS, or your PSP… or your iPhone.) You do have to enter in new mac addresses when you replace old machines or devices, but it takes maybe ten minutes and is a great precaution against unwanted intruders on your home network. Not to mention, it’s just plain smart. Who knows what leechers are doing while pretending to look like you?

Network filtering. Learn it. Know it. Use it.