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Queensland Police to Look For Unsecured WiFi Spots
OzPeter writes "As a part of National Consumer Fraud week, the Queensland Police are going war driving in order to identify insecure WiFi setups. From the press release: 'The War Driving Project involves police conducting proactive patrols of residential and commercial areas to identify unprotected connections. Police will follow this up with a letterbox drop in the targeted area with information on how to effectively secure your connection.' While some people may like having an open WiFi AP its interesting to see that the Police also feel that 'Having WEP encryption is like using a closed screen door as your sole means of security at home. The WPA or WPA2 security encryption is certainly what we would recommend as it offers a high degree of protection.'"
I have an open Wifi setup. My attitude is that connectivity has become basic infrastructure, and all "lock it down" freaks have just bought into the agenda of ISPs who don't want us to share bandwidth to boost their own profits.
If you're a guest in my home, you're welcome to use the bandwidth, along with the lights and water. Can you imagine visitig a friend only to be told, "Look, here's the PIN code to unlock the lights, and here's the key in case you want to wash your hands." Ridiculous. I accept that there's a risk of someone lurking in their car outside the property boundary to leech off my internet connection, but there's a risk of someone stealing water from my outside, unprotected taps, too. OTOH, if bandwidth were shared freely everywhere there'd be no need to sneak around "stealing" it, would there?
It's the 21st Century, man. Get over it!
Sweet, where do you live? I need to download some child porn, DDOS several government and military sites, setup a proxy relay, upload some Al Quada training manuals, run a password guesser against a few banking sites, and email out some death threats. Your connection sounds like it will do the trick quite nicely.
Secure your network and stow that "Bandwidth is freeee maaaaaan" garbage. It's not free, it takes resources to provide, and fewer people paying means less bandwidth being added to the infrastructure.
I personally don't secure my wireless, because the only way out of my local network is through a secured tunnel which uses much more robust security than anything the wifi standards employ. So the cops are welcome to tell me how insecure my wifi is, and root around my honeypot all they want, but nobody is going to get to actually do anything useful.