I normally work for a public sector organization. However, this weekend I’m providing support at a music festival in Scotland. The hacks and shooters for the event all “need” wireless (though I think I’ve now convinced them about changing that!).

Essentially, as another person has pointed out earlier,the important part of this article – step 4 states that a) you must have connected to an ad-hoc network with the BSSID “Free Public Wi-Fi”, and b) be in a position where your wi-fi device cannot hit any available network (neither ad-hoc nor infrastructure), nor any preferred infrastructure network, and so advertises the “Free Public Wi-Fi” network.

As “david” says above (response no. 6 to this blog), this would mean that you had previously connected to an ad-hoc network called “Free Public Wi-Fi”, meaning that, by Windows deafult settings for wireless, the network would be saved as a preferred network, causing the steps 1-4 to result in this issue.

Right, that took a bit – sorry:) but here’s my thought on a possible cause: “User Zero” in all of this – the first person to have this occur – may well have tried to manually join a network, simply hoping that typing “Free Public Wi-Fi” in as a network name would result in free internet. Let’s be honest and admit that there are people out there who would believe that would work – I have met MANY of them.

Regardless. this would then mean that what is happening is a device is in a mode where it is not connected to anything else, and as such is advertising this as their default BSSID. From this starting point, the behaviour described in this article then ensues.

To be clear, I’m agreeing with the article a lot, but think that there are a number of possible ways this phenomenon both begun and “propagated”.

Hope this makes sense, 8 hours sleep over four days makes one ramble…

Funny thing is, there were no other LT’s within range AND the bigger clue is that no matter how I hold the LT, the signal strength is always maxed out at 5/5 appearing to be a desirable connection.

After running Malwarebytes, a virus/trojan was found and removed.

Rebooted and no more “Free Public Wifi”!

i wasn’t even in public when it hit me… i was at home, all my availble networks looked normal. i beleive i restarted my computer…. then when i checked my available networks again i had “Free Public Wifi”, “hpsetup” AND “linksys” ad-hoc networks, none of which were there before. And they’re obviously coming from my pc, because they follow me everywhere i go…

this explanation seems logical, but i think something more fishy may be at work here, at least for me….. help lol

At one point i was regularly using an AP called Free Public WiFi in london two years ago, wonder if thats where it started.

just remove it from “preferred networks” list.

Does anyone else have this problem – how to fix it?

I’m using Windows to manage my wireless.

Who actually wants to use Microsoft products?

I’m glad there are finally alternatives.