http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/18 ... passwords/

The world's governments will be beating Google over the head with this for years to come, and not for our benefit

To be brutally honest it's probably in their best interest Google got it, if some hacker casually going by got it they wouldn't declare it and with an email password can get access to a lot more, such as ebay, amazon etc and change all the account details to prevent any knowledge.

Not protecting your wireless should be an offence, it's almost as bad as leaving the keys in your car ignition and walking off, giving a criminal everything they need short of a little knowledge on how to use it

Google have still been incredibly stupid to do this, though.

Who the hell at Google made the decision to collect and store this data?

I personally hope the EU whack them with a nice big fine.

Yes but most people still use WEP which was cracked some time ago. I use WPA2 and with a 20 digit randomly generated password. Though I have a mac only environment and discovered today that windows users cannot access it unless the encryption is turned off. So how do you share such networks legally?

Nobody made the "decision". The team responsible for Street View and the collection of geo-location data re-used some old code for scanning hotspots and collecting the SSIDs, the original, open source code also collected any unencrypted data it found during the scan.

It was, allegedly, only afterwards, when somebody was analysing the data, that they found out that it was collecting more than just the SSID and geo-location information.

It is possible that those unlicky enough to have been collecting e-mail, or downloading porn, just as the car was passing, but I doubt that Google were actually travelling around looking for this information. Given the fragments that they would be getting, it wouldn't make much sense. They would need to park for longer periods in front of the houses in order to be certain of getting useful information. What they got was through pure coincidence... That doesn't mean that they weren't in the wrong and that the person who took the open source code shouldn't have been more careful in checking it, before using it.

Modern Windows OSs can access WPA2 fine, must be an issue with how the network is configured. My wireless network is WPA2 and I have no issues

More likely that the Windows laptop was using an older Wi-Fi chipset, which doesn't support WPA2... We have a couple of ageing laptops and a USB stick which can't use WPA2/AES... I just don't let them on the LAN.

My Windows XP, Vista and 7 machines all connect with WPA2/AES, so Windows and the encryption methods aren't the problem, the chipset or manufacturers driver are the problem.