Steal This Wi-Fi?

[alexpgp]

There's a thought-provoking piece over at Wired, written by Bruce Schneier, that argues in favor of running an open wireless network at home. I have a great deal of respect for Schneier's opinions, and to tell the truth, I've never been burned by anyone using a wireless network that I've left open, though I suppose that's always a possibility (as Schneier acknowledges).

I must admit, however, that one of the first things that crossed my mind while reading the article was an item I had read on boingboing, about how a TV celebrity in the UK, in writing a newspaper editorial criticizing privacy activists for what he characterized as an overreaction to the British government's loss of financial details about of millions of UK households, published his bank account details in the article to underscore his assertion that "We have nothing to fear."

Whereupon, quoting the article, "someone promptly began making fraudulent withdrawals from his account." The kicker? Check this out:

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again," he said.

Anyway, leaving my Wi-Fi open right now is a moot point, as the house is pretty far from neighboring residences and I don't expect to be hosting computer-savvy company any time soon.

It's a thought, though.

Cheers...

Comments

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

Your neighbour may just have transient problems with his Internet and without protection your network is an obvious solution.

Plus there's that thing about *Wardriving* where people just park not that far away from your house and enjoy themselves to your wi-fi network...

WPA/PSK (PreShared Key) is easy, but relatively difficult to crack. PSK means you just enter the key (treat it as password to enter your network) and your network just works. It's installed by Sky by default, they just use your broadband password as your key (and you can change it later).

WEP is said to be all too easy to crack, so forget it.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Schneier talks about neighbors and wardrivers, and I can see his point about not being too concerned, unless the usage starts to interfere with nominal usage of the connection (e.g., someone downloading huge volumes of data via bittorrent, for example).

Moi, I've had WPA/PSK set up on my home network since setting it up last year in Texas. As you note, it's fairly simple (and it even works on Linux).

Cheers...

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

There's also a legal part in it.

Immense number of people round the world seem to be VERY concerned about the child porn. (To the point of hysteria, so people don't even put pics of their toddlers happily running round the seashore naked online anymore, because they're afraid of being accused of being child pornographers -- DUH!!)

Now imagine somebody wardriving at your location, downloading this kiddie porn, then you could (G-d forbid!) get to face the music for it, and prove that you're not a bleedin' paedo!