Dan wrote:
I need to connect my wife's mac laptop to our cable Internet. I have a
pc at the modem. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but a wireless router
concerns me, even with encryption. So I'm looking at these, a Netgear
product (belkin, others also make them) that basically turns your house
wiring into an Ethernet LAN:
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/XE102.php A set of 2 (what I'd
need for a connection to my wife's laptop in her office) is about 100
bucks, adding a router takes the total to ~$150. Once set, the
"transmitter" is plugged in to a wall outlet at the router, then the
"receiver" can by plugged into any house electrical outlet & you have an
Ethernet jack (though presumably the outlets must be on eht same side of
the 120 line?) I do have a concern though regarding whether or not our
signal might be propagated over the local power grid to other homes in
the area. Also, the device operates at 4 to 20 mhz. I'm guessing at
these frequencies, house wiring is not a very effective radiator, but is
it possible the signals may be broadcast under the right conditions?

TIA

Dan


I haven't tried those but they may well not be any more secure than a
wireless setup.

What you can do though is place the wireless portion on a different
subnet which gives you one more line of defense. There's custom
firmwares available for popular hacker-friendly routers like the Linksys
WRT-54GS which allow you to do this, or you could use an IP-Cop or
Smoothwall based PC router and plug a wireless router into the DMZ port.