Brian Krebs has a nice piece on the quiet update that Microsoft managed to make to XP.
Open up an XP portable, and if you’re looking with the right tools you’ll notice the machine starts scanning for wireless networks that it recognizes. It does this by sending out a beacon advertising the names of the networks it is seeking. An XP laptop will run through the entire list of network names with which it has previously associated, over and over, until the machine has associated with a network. Some wireless adapters will go so far as to automatically probe for randomly generated network names.
Tags: Windows XP, Wireless, Brian Krebs
