The author decided to show that if he knew all but one character of his network password, he could bruteforce the missing character. To that end, he took all 256 possibilities for that character, and computed the resulting keys. Then tried connecting with those keys.
This shows a connection rate of 30 attempts/2 minutes which is 0.25/second. That is not practical for most attacks.
The way my cable modem is set up, there are only 16 bits of the WPA key that aren't shared with the MAC address in an obvious way. Because of the configuration, it's impossible for me to change this. So anyone with this knowledge can break into my network by changing two characters -- pretty trivial.
Time Warner Wideband. I work around it by having a router behind the modem which firewalls off the rest of the network -- I treat the modem's side as completely untrusted. Not perfect, but it works.
The author decided to show that if he knew all but one character of his network password, he could bruteforce the missing character. To that end, he took all 256 possibilities for that character, and computed the resulting keys. Then tried connecting with those keys.
This shows a connection rate of 30 attempts/2 minutes which is 0.25/second. That is not practical for most attacks.