Not entirely accurate:

More holes have been picked in the security measure designed to protect the privacy and data of wi-fi users.

Of course, when you actually read the article, it turns out to be yet another attack on WEP.

WEP is not the security measure. WEP is a security measure, and it’s an extremely poor one. WPA, which is on pretty much every ADSL router that people in the UK actually own because it’s been around for about as long as WEP’s been useless, is the security measure that people should be using, but this article only actually mentions that close to the end and then adds a bunch of confusion about WPA2.

It’s also incorrect on operating systems: since Windows 2000, for example, has no native wireless support, everything depends on the driver. Therefore the Ralink-chipset PCI card my brother uses on his Win2K-running room PC can connect to the home WPA network with absolutely no difficulty.

If you have Windows XP, you can update to SP2 unless it’s a pirate copy; and even then, you should be able to find a mate with a copy that will. If you have Vista, Linux or a Mac running recent OS X there’s no difficulty with WPA or WPA2. And the only current, mainstream device I can think of which isn’t WPA by default is the Nintendo DS; the 360 through its wireless adapter, the PSP (above firmware 2.0, which you’ll have had to update to play any games anyway), PS3 and Wii all support it fine. And yet the guy from BT who they question says:

A spokesman for BT said that it used WEP on its home hub products because of the compatibility issues.

“We use WEP for a very sensible reason,” said the spokesman, “there are a number of devices out there in the marketplace that do not use WPA.”

So why not supply it WPA as default (as Sky and Be Unlimited do) and then tell people in the manual or on an information sheet how to scale it down using an Ethernet cable and a web browser if they actually have some of the ancient crap they worry about? By supplying WEP you are supplying a product that is broken and gives a false sense of security – WEP is about as secure as covering a broken window with tin foil.

A better way to go about this from a consumer protection point of view would be an article talking about how WPA improves your security, how to put it on and at the end say that if there’s any difficulty with it, update your devices and if that doesn’t work, WEP might have to be your least worst option if you can’t put an Ethernet cable out to them. At least the ISPs have stopped supplying routers which default to unencrypted now, but there’s still a long way to go and articles like this one are not helping.