This is not a solution. Three years later, and I still get the feeling nobody offering answers here has fully read my posts here or understands the problem.
BurrWalnut's suggestion is to manually select the connection properties for each network, one-by-one.
If you had read my original question, and my follow-up response on August 23rd, 2013 you would know that this is not satisfactory.
If you even understood the problem you would know this is not satisfactory.
Let's ignore the fact that this is a Win 8 problem, not Win 7, and BurrWalnut's instructions don't exactly work the same way in Win8. You can (allegedly) change the connection properties for each network in Win 8, but you can't get there the way he describes.
Quoting myself from August 23rd 2013:
" Further, I would like to point out that manually identifying and opting out of "connect automatically" for each network that does not belong to me (if indeed that is even possible, which it seems that it is not), is both tedious and ignorant of the underlying security risk posed by Windows 8 having the default setting of "connect automatically" chosen by default for all networks within range.
Why do I say this is a security risk?
Because even if am able to opt-out of "connect automatically" to all undesired networks which currently appear within range on the network list in the sidebar, that list is constantly changing. I live in a densely populated area and new networks appear and disappear on that list frequently. Even if I am able to opt-out of "connect automatically" from networks I can currently identify, it does not address the issue of trying to connect automatically to new networks which I have not seen or yet identified."
Your response was marked by someone as an answer. I unmarked it because it is not an answer to my original problem.
The best solution I have found is called GET RID OF WINDOWS COMPLETELY. To that end I have two suggestions:
- Linux. It's free and it works great, there are a lot of good distros out there that are well-supported.
- ReactOS which can be found at www.reactos.org
React is another free operating system which looks and feels very much like Windows, and is designed to be compatible with Windows software. It is NOT a
Linux distro which is designed to be superficially similar to Windows, it's actually a scratch-built OS which is meant to be binary compatible with Windows. Which means you should be able to install and run most, if not all
of you favorite Windows software on it. It is also designed to not be as privacy invasive as the latest versions of Windows.
The developers do not claim it is 100% Windows compatible, you may find some applications and drivers that are not supported, and if you do you are encouraged to report them to the development community so they can get to work fixing it. That said, so far everything
I have tried works just fine. It's also relatively lightweight, it only takes about 500mb of disk space. Plus if you just want to try it out you can boot it from a live CD without installing anything on your PC or altering your current OS.
So that's my preferred solution -- GET RID of Microsoft Windows and replace it with something that works properly (AND most importantly) is actually supported by a development community which is knowledgeable and responsive to questions from users.