I agree, the AIS really makes a difference, especially if you are planning to be around areas busy with ships at night. It is going to be pretty pointless in the middle of the Atlantic, but still worth the effort when you are approaching coast.

Additionally, make sure you get an EPIRB, there is pretty much nothing like that for signalling your position in case of distress, and it makes you sleep better.

For the rest, go with your taste...

Hi,
I have been using a Linksys WRT54GL since years now with wireless wide open. I live in an area which has a lot of tourists and people passing by, so I have the satisfaction that leaving the access open actually gives a benefit to a relatively large amount of people.
After years, things have been tweaked considerably, so here are my suggestions for a relatively secure implementation:
- I use the latest Tomato firmware on a WRT54GL
- while the network is completely open, I use IP-based access limitation, that is if you are a known person/computer (your MAC address is, in fact) I'll manually add you to a list so that the DHCP gives you an address in the region 192.168.1.10-20 or so, while otherwise you are offered a random IP in the usual .100-.200 pool.
- guest (.100-.200) enjoy only ports 80 and 443
- known machines have full access
- I implement QoS (reason I have gone with Tomato, it was the easiest to set up) and guests have always class E, which I defined as the lowest priority, so when I am at home I don't notice their presence, while if not there they can use my bandwidth at will, and I don't mind.
- I leave my router on at all times, even if I am away for weeks, as I know that some people started relying on it and like that they can avoid spending pointless money thanks to my open wifi; this also helps reducing the amount of wifi in the air and the undesired interference issues (currently counting tens of access points per block and having a hard time finding a free channel)

I know that the security is inexistant, and that the MAC/IP-based access control is very weak, but it si enough to prevent all the people with win machines and a trojan/bot to start spamming the world. Obviously it will not stop a malicious attacker, but I personally believe that those are more the exception than the rule, and I harden my machines otherwise (locally, at machine level) to protect from those.

Not suggesting this is the best solution ever, just saying that this has been proven to be working with relatively little effort for years in a quite busy street with several people accessing per day. Oh and yes, some of them gave up or never subscribed to an ISP, but well, I don't think an artificially created market has a reason by itself to exist; some people still will want their full control on the bandwidth, or full privacy, and those will still be customers; ISPs shouldn't fear my access point too much.

My 2 cents,
Fabio

I'm the founder of a OSS restaurant management software (http://www.myhandyrestaurant.org/) and we're really looking at these linux ports on PDAs, because it would be the best solution for our customers. If we could hack a cheap PDA and install linux, we could create an ad-hoc distribution having only a browser (the application is web-based) and vpn connection autostarting at boot. This would really be fool-proof, plus would save battery power, thanks to wise process administration (unneeded desktop environment and so on are not started). Probably Linux on PDAs is not needed for the wide public, but for industrial or special application it will be the best solution. Bye