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Neighborhood WiFi Security

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the put-out-an-electronic-welcome-mat dept.

picaro writes to tell us the New York Times has an interesting piece about the abundance of open wireless connections available due to the lack of the average user's knowledge. The article also takes a look at how the prevalent attitude is that tapping in to these connections does not equate to stealing and why still other may disagree. From the article: "Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture."

2 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. New occurences in American culture... by necro2607 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.

    Yeah, like computer users getting sued by the RIAA when they have never used any P2P software on their machine, for example...

  2. Bizarre attitudes by caffeination · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I got into this article without signing up yesterday. Can't today, so I'm quoting from memory.
    ...I thought "Oh my God! People could be using my connection too!".
    Six months later, however, $Person still hasn't secured her wireless network.
    My parents were the same. I took my laptop into the garden, showed them that I could get onto their connection from at least 50m from the house, then I connected to the neighbours' connections and changed their essids to demonstrate how easy such things are. Then I opened ethereal and demonstrated to them how easy it was to read peoples' internet traffic.

    All I got was "That shouldn't be allowed".

    Under my own initiative, I then put a fairly long encryption key on their network and password protected the router config. I know it's weak security, but it's better than none at all.

    That is how much people care about security. I explained to my uncle the other day about how spyware can log your key presses and report them back to a server. He was shocked and outraged, for about 1 second. Once his computer was clean enough to be usable, he was satisfied (this is a home & business computer, used for EBAY).

    Nobody gives a shit about anything to do with computers. It seems that the current parent generation was lead to believe that technology would make life easier and do all the work for them, when the reality is that it's actually replaced much of the work. God knows what long term effects this will have on computing.