From ISPreview:

WeFi, a free wireless Wi-Fi broadband Hotspot locator website with a database of 47,000,000 access points around the world, has revealed that 40% of Hotspots in the USA are unlocked and do not require a security password. This compares with 25% in Europe.

According to WeFi’s data, a traveler would find a higher percentage of open hotspots in countries such as Thailand, Israel, Brazil, Argentina and the Bahamas as compared with both the US and Europe. Across the world, approximately 30% of recorded Wi-Fi access points are unlocked, while some 70% are locked

Full Article: ISPreview

Via Slashdot:

Researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck ‘have just opened the box on a whole new hacker playground, says Dragos Ruiu, organizer of the PacSec conference. At the conference, Tews will show how he was able to partially crack WPA encryption in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop. To do this, Tews and Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes. They have not, however, managed to crack the encryption keys used to secure data that goes from the PC to the router in this particular attack. ‘Its just the starting point,’ said Ruiu.