[Cialug] Slightly OT: Interesting wireless networking article

[Tim Wilson]

I found this interesting article about wireless networking on ZDNet:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=454

I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
<quote>
I've added SSID beacon suppression to the list of "worse than no
wireless security at all" because it forces you to spew your wireless
LAN configuration from your laptop everywhere you go.  Security
researcher Joshua Wright recently highlighted these dangers in this
article. The problem with turning off SSID beaconing on your access
point is that not only is it worthless, since the SSIDs are still
easily detectible over the air, but it also forces your laptops to
probe for the SSID. That means that all of your laptops will run
around the world broadcasting your SSID, which opens them up to data
seepage or even evil twin attacks. If you forget this nonsense about
SSID beacon suppression on the access point, you can turn off SSID
probing on your notebooks, making them safer to operate. You can do
this with the latest Windows XP SP2 Wireless Client Update, and
Windows Vista has this feature built in. You simply need to make sure
that you don't enable "Connect even if the network is not
broadcasting."  The default behavior for SSID probing in Windows Vista
is off, which is the safe setting.
</quote>

I have always heard turning off SSID broadcasting was suggested, but
this guy appears to say that turning it off is bad.  What are others
thoughts on this?

-- 
Tim