Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots

the digital nomad writes "If you've had enough of your neighbor stealing your Wi-Fi connection or letting his dog s#%t on your lawn, there is now a better solution than suffering in silence with your brooding anger: leave your neighbor 'a message!' Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots let your networks say what you cannot. And if you're looking for some great name for your Hotspot, make sure to read this post by Gizmodo."

Comments

Re:Or.

[BlueTrin]

The above poster is referring to this link in the article.

Re:Or.

[TheLink]

Not as fun as this:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

You might even purposely not secure your wifi ;).

Spaces are allowed in SSIDs

[Anonymous Coward]

SSIDs are up to 32 characters long and may contain any 8-bit character you want. There is no need to CamelCase or justconcatenateitall. If you're going to be passive-aggressive instead of (or in addition to) simply securing your access point, at least make your message readable. IMHO, anyone offering OR using unsecured wireless LANs without proper encryption on top gets what they deserve.

Re:You don't really need to be a jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

tard

Re:Best way to deal with this is good old Cat5.

[Abcd1234]

But seriously I agree with you. If you're in a fixed place like your home, it makes more sense to just plug into a nearby jack (in my case - a phone jack).

Sure... assuming you have ethernet jacks sprinkled about your walls everywhere. Oh, and an ethernet jack on your laptop. And carry ethernet cable around with you. And you don't plan to get up and move around anywhere.

So, yeah, assuming all that, wires make way more sense...

Re:Other issues

[snspdaarf]

I don't like my neighbours because they leave passive-aggressive notes as their SSID. I AM NOT A HOSEPUNCHER! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS.

That's the guy that take normal garden hose and makes sprinkler hose out of it by punching tiny little holes from one end to the other. The previous job description, "leak maker", has been deprecated.

Re:Other issues

[Sandbags]

Yea, actually tried going through the HOA first. Talking to the guy directly was something we'd done before with no success on other issues. He was a real asshole to start with. Kinda felt good doing that.

i also lacked mentioning (since I didn't think anyone cared), that I was primary network support for about 10 houses in the neighborhood, and help a lot of folks with their gear for little or no charge, after they met me at a garrage sale and saw all my used gear and inquired as to my job. If he was open to that kind of chat, we would have. he proved ignorant and aggressive to start with... Might have shed some context on that.

Not passive-aggressive

[michaelmalak]

Sending messages over SSIDs is not passive-aggressive, it's avoidant. It could be considered passive-aggressive in a contrived example, such as if a neighbor makes lewd comments to your wife, your wife demands that you talk to the neighbor about it, but instead you decide to communicate over SSID. In that case, you have a responsibility set up by an authority of sorts, and you have ducked that responsibility by fulfilling its terms perhaps by letter and certainly not in spirit.

"Passive-aggressive" is a catch-phrase that has been broadened in pop psychology, in part because the Internet has permitted so many more avoidant behaviors and people need a name for it and use the one that has enjoyed more use in the popular (primarily entertainment) media.

Re:Other issues

[Sandbags]

I honestly thought it would only be once or twice before he'd ask someone for help. And eventually we did help him, once he was pissed off enough to start a conversation. Some people are just too stubborn for their own good, and in the end he learned a valuable lesson, and it still cost him less than BestBuy installing it for him.

Maybe after replacing/exchanging 5-6 routers, he should have simply read the manual, since if he actually did that, he would have secured it...

At least it was only an annoyance. We cost him no damage, less money that BestBuy would have charged for in-home support, and though we could have screwed with his computer as well, that would have actualyl violated laws...

Not my finest hour, but some people only learn through trial by fire, and this guy was one of those.