LZ2DMV
Most laptops connected to Wi-Fi are indeed connected to an AP or a SOHO router that does NAT, so the attacker won't be able to directly reach it and this is a requirement for this to work.
Consider intelligence operation abroad, for example.
Whether or not the victim will be notified about the absence of encryption, depends on the state of a single bit on the SIM card [1]. In 99% of the cases, there is no warning that the handset is currently using A5/0.
From now on, you are at the grace of the rogue network operator - they can send you anything from any number, sit in the middle of every call and capture every frame of data.
I don't think the current level of technological education of the general public is enough for most of them to know why it is important to force your phone to work only with modern network standards and that is what police and other government agencies interested in operating IMSI catchers exploit.
[1] http://blog.taddong.com/2011/02/does-your-phone-warn-you-whe...
An investment in something like HackRF+PortaPack clone is far better, IMHO.
A collection of modified firmwares for the Quansheng UV-K5 handheld radio
Various miscellaneous modifications: https://github.com/amnemonic/Quansheng_UV-K5_Firmware/tree/m...
GNU/Linux ROM reading and writing tool: https://github.com/sq5bpf/k5prog
If Intel Boot Guard works by including a public key in a fuse in all CPUs from a set of series and now the corresponding private key is leaked, why isn't this a global problem? The same CPU with the same public key must be in every machine with an Intel CPU from these generations. What am I missing here?