This is the most excellent story I’ve heard in quite a while, but it does smell a little weird: if this the case, why is it just “Free Public WiFi” that you see everywhere?
I think because “Free Public WiFi” is the phrase that most successfully gets people to connect, enough to launch it into exponential transmission. Natural selection? The ad-hoc part is important, too; it’s much less common as a wireless setup and wouldn’t be used by your typical wifi hotspot or home router.
There’s a WEP crack called Caffe Latte that is based on [i think?] the same feature of Windows that stores information about previously authenticated networks, kind of like the windows “keychain access.” The attack spoofs a previously authenticated Access Point and stimulates reauth attempts until enough data is collected to decrypt. It’s called Caffe Latte because it works in about the same time to drink a cup of coffee.