Last week I got off the train in a town called Agde, France and saw a cafe with a free wifi sign. Since I had an hour to kill for the bus to arrive, I treated myself to a cup of coffee and then inquired about the free wifi. The password was 26 characters long! I got it on the second try. If you are in Agde, the password is 3111637DGFF44CA6127E421DF3. Has anyone had an experience similar to this?

It's the encryption key. My wifi at work is that long as well.

Stayed in a rental house in Uzes couple months ago, and the password was 30 characters!

The password for our home wifi is probably that long! The whole point in having a password is to keep unwanted folks from logging on. Be grateful for the security!

The password "3111637DGFF44CA6127E421DF3" is supposed to be a number; it was probably randomly generated. It's in hexdecimal format. Unlike decimal (1-10) hexdecimal uses base 16 (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F,10,11...). The reason computers like hexdecimal is that they use binary logic to store and manipulate numbers. 16 is 2 to the 4th power, so base 16 works very well to store binary numbers. Base 10 (decimal) works great for humans because we have ten fingers, but it's lousy for representing binary numbers compactly.

But you've probably typed it wrong; "G" is not a digit. You probably meant "6" . You have the right number of characters (26) for a 128 bit WEP key (wireless password), though. WEP is really old and obsolete (and horribly insecure). It forces you to use a number like that for a password. Modern wireless routers use WPA2 which lets you choose a simple text password instead of a 26 digit number!

This is certainly common in France - our Orange Livebox (router) has a similar code. The consolation is that once you have entered it (which often means doing it a second time to confirm) you are recognized and don't have to do it again.

Good point, Carlux, everytime I walked by that restaurant, I was able to check for messages.