[ttepasse]

I'm not a designer and I mostly fail to have a designer's eye for such things. But here the icons seem really clear:

security - a stylized lock. connectivity - linked members of a chain, which are connected. WLAN - expanding circes of a radiowave login - a human head on an upper body

All which exist as icons for decades in other UI. In this case there seems to be a design constraint of only using circles, semicircles and quartercircles. That fails most in case of the Wifi Symbol which needs concentric rings. Here those are just simulated. And the metaphor of chain links for connectivity strains. But that was also the case when it stands for hyperlink.

[wille92]

That is fair, I probably sold the design short when I said they didn't illustrate anything. I guess my negative reaction comes the work I have to do as a user--it took some amount of time for me to look at the icons and discern their meaning. I didn't get that immediate "4 semi-circles = WLAN" recognition that most icons provide.