Could That Be The Wireless Police Knocking?

netbuzz writes "Should private-property owners be required to practice safe wireless? Are the wireless police about to come a-knockin' on the front door of your castle? Network World reports on a condo complex in Arizona that will monitor your wireless signal for security. Is this the way all condos and apartment complexes should go?" From the article: "'We just kind of kicked it around the table and everybody said that's a helluva good idea, (mandatory encryption) ought to go in the declarations,' says Welch. However, a lawyer warned that wireless technology could quickly overrun any specific covenants they put to paper, 'so we decided that instead of recording (declarations) at the county that we would leave it up to the hotel manager to put it in their rules and regulations.' Why bother at all? 'We just don't want to see anybody hurt with their wireless system,' says Welch. 'If someone (unauthorized) were accessing it and an owner's information, there could be damage and a potential lawsuit.'"

Comments

no thanks

[eliot1785]

Could it be that maybe, just maybe, somebody wants to actually SHARE? Sacrilege, I know.

Overall, I am worried that people these days consistently seem to say "I'm not in favor of too much regulation, but this specific piece seems pretty good."

Uh huh. You know the slippery slope has started to apply when people say that about such inane proposals as this one.

Re:Why single out wireless protection?

[MichaelSmith]

They don't require you to lock your car door when you park in your parking space. How is this any different?

It was on dumblaws.com (I can't find the link now) and its true that here in Victoria, Australia it is illegal to leave your car unattended with the keys in the ignition. I have an friend with OCD who loves to point that out to people.

Its stupid but it keeps the stupid people happy and gives them something to talk about.

Re:Why single out wireless protection?

[ewireless]

I'm actually OK with making it illegal to leave your keys in the car ignition because kids could get ahold of it too easily and hurt others. In the extreme, it's probably illegal to leave a loaded gun in your driveway for similar reasons. But I don't see how wireless protection falls into this category. This sounds purely like they're just trying to make you lock the door to your network when it's your own business whether you want to share or not. Of course, if it's against the law or contract to share your wireless connection with your neighbors (something that is true with some DSL contracts), then I can see how an apartment complex might want to try to keep their tenant community from stealing shared service and this whole thing might actually make some sense.

Won't anybody think of the users?

[raju1kabir]

My first reaction was "Good Lord, how stupid can people get?" - I mean, does this mean that if you set up a wireless network in accordance with their regulations, and it still gets abused (through WEP weaknesses or whatever), they have implicitly invited you to sue them?

But then I thought back to ohhh, yesterday, when I was wrapping up a work trip to Thailand. When I arrived I had bought a SIM card at a dusty little family shop and the cashier who installed it into my phone signed me up for a bunch of promo offers including the loathsome Calling Melody (which I never figured out how to disable) and 50 free hours of GPRS (pretty good considering the card cost me US$7.50).

My hotels had free wifi so I didn't end up using that much of the GPRS time. Yesterday, at the airport, I figured I might as well use some more of it up, so I popped open the trusty iBook and turned on internet sharing with SSID name "Free Internet!"

Within 15 minutes I had 5 or 6 people on it (must have been painfully slow for them). I was too tired to do anything useful, but just for the heck of it I started up ethereal to see to what ends my largesse was being used. It was remarkable how trusting (or probably ignorant) people were - as well as how many unencrypted port-80 webmail servers and office intranets there are out there.

So maybe the real value of the rule in TFA is to protect the users from themselves, rather than protecting the AP owners. When you connect to an unknown AP you never really know what could be going on with your traffic unless you encrypt and authenticate it.