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Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals To Unlock Their Wi-Fi (bbc.com)
Rescue teams searching for earthquake survivors in central Italy have asked locals to unlock their Wifi passwords. The Italian Red Cross says residents' home networks can assist with communications during the search for survivors, reports BBC. From the report: On Wednesday a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck central Italy and killed more than 240 people. More than 4,300 rescuers are looking for survivors believed to still be trapped in the rubble. On Twitter, the Italian Red Cross posted a step-by-step guide which explains how local residents can switch off their Wifi network encryption. Similar requests have been made by the National Geological Association and Lazio Region. A security expert has warned that removing encryption from a home Wifi network carries its own risks, but added that those concerns are trivial in the context of the rescue operation.
This sort of reckless openness in communications sends the message that so called 'disasters' are a free-for-all for pirates, child pornographers, and terrorists.
Any right-thinking citizen would agree that a few unimportant people staying buried in rubble is a small price to pay to secure the internet against intellectual property theft and anonymous communication by evildoers.
And yet if something illegal happens on the WiFi, will the govt ignore it?
This is a horrible idea, sorry. The govt should bring in WiFi hotspots, and not put locals at risk.
Create a "guest access" account on the router and allow that? Absolutely! No problem with that at all, especially since I can log who connects.
Remove all security and just turn my connection (and all liability in a nation not known for being especially scrupulous with it's accusations of wrong-doing) over to the whims of chaos?
No.
Sorry, but better to not expose myself to that kind of risk, than have to fight my way out of kangaroo court.
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Maybe people have more important things to do than wanking about computer security after an earthquake happens?
Those good old days of cyberanarchistic freedom, gone forever now, I guess, but still fondly remembered.
I already do, I even have a roof top access point (UniFi Outdoor+) to help w/signal propagation.. ssid: openwireless.org
its on its own vlan with a very restrictive set of firewall rules that only let you use opendns servers w/some basic content filtering..
I am in a cellular deadspot due to a hill, one bar if your lucky.. no data.. most of my neighbors use it and none of em can get a connection strong enough to come close to impacting my internet speeds.. so I dont even bother throttling em.
Its a resource I have in abundance, why not share it?
Well, not all of them, but I'm sadly sure that some criminals will be willing to take advantage of the situation. Of course the most serious threat is that the extremely black-hat hackers will exploit the unlocked WiFi networks to pwn routers and linked computers for later abuse. In accord with Dan Ariely's research, the criminals will think they are being relatively nice guys by saving their major depredations until after the immediate emergency has been addressed.
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/f... is a quasi-review of one of his books about dishonesty, even including an honest email exchange...
However, I think it would be much better if we did it the other way around. Rather than maximizing the profits of the big Internet companies, we should always be configured to run as much of the infrastructure as possible on our own systems. In other words, WiFi routers would normally be configured for safe sharing, and handling emergencies would just be a natural extension of wireless communications that the big Internet companies are not controlling and profiting from.
Punchline is that profit is not the primary driver of the bad design. It's all about controlling our communications. I think the primary driver for centralized control of the Internet is the governments. They WANT the rules and laws to work that way. If things got out of control, if the peasants were actually in charge of the Internet, how would they control the peasants? Real democracy scares them more than anything.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I mean seriously? Why wouldn't you? I've read a heap of the comments about how insane you would have to be and all the legal risk you would be at but we're not talking about leaving it permanently unsecured, we are talking about a short period of time during a national emergency where people around you are buried under collapsed buildings!!
Christ I get it, you have you NAS full of your super sensitive material, well turn the fucking thing off then. This is slashdot ffs, are you seriously telling me that you don't have the capability to turn off a computer you don't want someone to access?
People are dying, infrastructure has been damaged. Who knows what state their mobile network is in, perhaps it's not possible to bring in wifi hotspots.
The chances that if all people unsecure their wifis that your connection will even get used is pretty small. The chances yours gets used by a malicious actor is vanishingly small. The chances that your open wifi saves a life is also tiny, however it might. So I just don't get why someone wouldn't be willing to take on a little, essentially insignificant, risk if it might save someone.
If an earthquake or similar disaster happens near me, not only would I happily open my network, but I would be out there trying to physically help people, so I could just turn everything off for a couple of days as I'm not using it. Maybe I'm the strange one.
But you may easily be across the street from such a person and able to help the rescue team with a bit of connectivity.