Your WiFi password is only useful for someone who is within 100 feet of your house. If you have federal agents surveilling you from 100 feet away you have way bigger problems than your WiFi password.
That said, I read the article more as 'yet another reason this whole compelling third parties is an issue' sorts of reasoning as opposed to this is some new threat that we didn't know about. The author points out it has been covered in lots of places. The argument is that more for the folks who aren't thinking they are affected by this because they aren't dissidents or people of interest (yet).
Quote: "The typical gain for this kind of antenna in the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band is about 10 dB."
The gain over a baseline quarter-wave ground-plane antenna obviously comes from the device's directionality.
So define "good design". If you mean an optimal design at any cost, of course not. If you mean clever use of readily available materials, it's a great design.
For my specific setup, it's something of a moot point. With my home office and router at the front of the house, a distance enough to include the back yard will also include a fair chuck of the street. It may be close enough that I'd notice the suspicious vehicle, though.
The idea that the parent poster was trying to point out is that at the point the feds are within 100 ft of your house in a truck or 1000 yards but targeting your house with an antenna, they'll find a way. How secure your Wifi password is irrelevant. At that point they've probably tapped your phones.
Actually, this is what amuses me in the whole privacy affair. So a bunch of companies were using and abusing your data to target ads at you and shape your news stream so that it's more addictive, and people were cheering. A government (still mostly democratic, though not from my non-US perspective) is revealed to snoop on people illegally and people rage. I don't actually question the rage – but I see the complacent acceptance of the private companies using the same data as amusing.
A large part (not whole, though) of what NSA does is taking your stuff from the place it already shouldn't have been. We're complaining about a fireplace in a burning forest.
I don't mind getting targeted ads, I prefer them to spam ads.
And the reason that it's much scarier if private companies abuse privacy than if the government does it, is that you yourself decide who the government is. You don't get that right wrt a private company.
"Gubment" is pretty silly, though.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=SPELT%2BSpelt%2...
from the people that authorizes budget, to the contractors in hawaii reading your info, to the agents in CIA/FBI building evidence against you, to the cops arresting you...
not a single one is your representative. Your only representatives are all in the same dark as you are.
As a practical matter, you have a lot more to fear from corporations misusing your private data to deny you jobs, mess up your credit, etc, than you do from government misusing your private data to shut down your anarchist political movement.
Large business, owned by very rich people. Without campaign contribution limitations and regulation, the voice of people is drowned out by the flow of money. We're about the least regulated in that respect in about a century.
It is hopeless to expect the gov't to not do whatever corporations commonly get away with.
Once the corporations do it, the information in question becomes private property. Now all the gov't has to do is persuade the corporation to hand over or "sell" some little nuggets of their private property. As it is private property that is not yours, it is none of your business in the eyes of the law whether these nuggets of private property are dizzyingly complete records about you.
Then the NSA/GCHQ/BND scandal hit and (at least as far as I can tell) now completely overshadows that former concern.
Source: If you log in to https://play.google.com from a desktop computer, you can install apps on your phone. You get the permissions dialog on the website (on your desktop computer), not on your phone.
How they install them?
Your curt response oversimplifies the situation to the point where an uninformed reader could mistakenly believe the situation has no impact. Your comment should be read in the light of an engineer not only completely missing the point, but an example of the danger of this type of engineering analysis.
Minor technical decisions that "make sense" sometimes have severe technical repercussions.
On (http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/) you can find some values on how slow it is. The same computer can crack 7 billion md5 hash per seconds, but it can barely do 181 thousand WPA2 password per second.
At this speed you would need more than 200 days just to crack a 7 letter password only using a-zA-Z0-9. And more than 38 years to crack an 8 letter password. If your password is a word or derivation of a word, you can obviously get it much faster with a dictionary attack.
(Quick search, seems a good explanation, if anyone else is curious.)
As do actors other than Federal agents.