This Little Piggyback Went to Market

I agree there's nothing to be scared about in shared wireless networks. I'm all for them in principle. But in my own experience, restricting my wireless network with a password on my home computer has dramatically increased its Web speed. Safety and privacy aside, this is a great reason to limit freeloaders on my wireless connection.

My father lives on a main road in a resort area, across the street from a B&B. He got a call from the B&B owner, who saw that every morning his parking spaces filled up with random cars. He talked to one of them, and it turned out that my father's unsecured network had become a convenient way of going online from one's car during the day.

The resource issue was not connection speed but rather parking spaces. Needless to say, the next time I visited I turned on the WPA and showed him how to use the password protection. The neighbor could have utilized my father's connection, but was much happier getting his parking spaces back.

Wait, if a password is required, and people have an actual formalized agreement to share the connection, why won't they just share the password?

There is a better way, especially for situations where you know exactly who (i.e,, which exact computer) is going to be accessing a given network. You can disable the password protection (and get a speed bump, BTW) and enable MAC address filtering. Using filtering ensures that only approved computers go on the network but don't suffer the speed hit of using WPA or similar. Also, it's not a matter of sharing the password; someone has to log in to the admin of the network to add a new computer, so everyone can see if someone was added.

On a separate note, there is a case to be made for regarding unauthorized Net access as stealing. If someone came to my house and plugged their RV in to a power plug on the side of my house, I'd be paying for their juice; I'd call that theft of some kind. Just because most US plans are all-you-can-eat doesn't mean the concept doesn't apply: many carriers claim to be unlimited downloads but the fine print of your contract allows them to both throttle your bandwidth as well as cut you off for the month if they detect (in their sole discretion, in adherence to circumstances or conditions they won't tell you about, natch) too much activity at once or over time.
If someone logs into to check their email and then moves on, it may not be a big theft, but that doesn't mean it's ok as a matter of principle, especially at a larger scale.

I agree with torrentprime that MAC address filtering is the way to
go, if your access point supports it. It keeps other people off;
of course it doesn't give any privacy but then for my real work
I'm running ssh (and vnc) on a linux laptop so the bits in the
ether don't matter. I also turn off the SSID-broadcast, which I
think makes it slightly difficult for casual freeloaders to discover
the network.

On my suburban street my new laptop found 8 open networks - it seems
most people just don't worry about this stuff. When the WH can lose
5M emails and the credit card companies lose millions of numbers,
home network security is the least of our problems.

Matt, please don't encourage people to ignore basic security measures such as turning on wireless encryption and setting a non-default password on your access point. If you want to share your broadband connection with your neighbors, by all means follow jhupp's suggestion and share the password. But it has become trivially easy for "the bad guys" to do serious harm to someone running an unsecured wireless network.

(In one scenario, hackers exploit the lack of WPA encryption and default password to reprogram your router's DNS settings, causing any request to an online banking site to be silently redirected to a malicious server. Google drive-by pharming.)

I haven't read the fine print in my cable-internet contract recently -
I suspect there's some legalese in there intended to prohibit sharing
a single connection between several households ? But it may be hard
to detect when the router makes it look like one machine.

The other problem would be how to deal with outages and technical
problems. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to have 10 people
sharing 2 or more wireless networks and cable-internet connections.
But what's technically smart is usually prohibited by the big
corporations unless and until they can figure out how to make money
off it.

In some states it is indeed a criminal offense to access another person's wireless network without authorization. In fact, in Florida it is a third degree felony. As you can imagine, it varies state to state. While stigamtizing logging onto open networks as stealing may be abusrd, it's also true in some places.

My 2 computers that run off a wireless (and high-speed cable) were acting very slow on the internet, and I couldn't figure out why. Then a techie friend asked if I had a secure wireless connection and I said no. He said that probably all the people piggybacking on my wireless was slowing down my functionality. I programmed a secure, password connection, and now my connection is fast as hell.

Word to the wise.

i use the MAC filter to limit computers, and turn off SSID broadcast. but turning off the SSID broadcast is a serious inconvenience with windows -- windows (XP at least) does not seem to have an easy way to just type in the network you want to use (that is, if windows doesn't see it, it makes it very difficult to add). not an issue on macs.

In pratice, though, it's extremely unlikely that anything bad will happen to you as a result of running an open wireless network.

This is simply untrue. Here are two of many scenarios.

1. I tap onto your network, get into your router (probably didn't change the default admin password for that either) and change your DNS servers to my DNS server.

You log onto what you think is www.chase.com to check your balance, but in reality my DNS server sends you to my copy of the Chase home page. You enter your user name and password to log in, I have them now.

2. Your neighbor taps into your wifi network and begins downloading kiddy porn. The FBI shows up at your door.

The first scenario is already happening and many advisories have been generated from it.

Secure your wifi.

Its not just internet connection. They can also connect to you're home network and access those files depending upon permission levels.

Megadittos to dubiousraves comment about the effect of password protecting on speed.

While I agree that saying an open wireless network as stealing doesn't make any more sense than saying someone who enters a business that has a sign saying "Open" is tresspassing, there are good security reasons not to leave your network completely open unless you at least understand how to manage the security setup for devices on the network.

For example, if you just plug in a router and don't change the defaults except to turn on wireless, I could connect to the network, figure out what type of router it is, lookup the default password online, and essentially take control of the router. This would allow me not only to adjust the router's settings (restrict MAC addresses, change the password, etc), but also to flash the router's firmware in many models, which would allow me to have the router do whatever I want with the packets that go through it. I'd also be able to interact with any shared stuff on the computers on the network.

Another good reason is simply freeloaders - checking email or reading the news is unlikely to appreciably slow down internet access other users, but more data intensive actions like streaming video can start crowding out traffic by the network's owners, and it isn't necessarily an established cultural norm that it's rude to do it on other people's networks when they're not explicitly provided for your convenience.

The comments about theft are off-topic, IMO. MY explicitly states that we're talking about consensual sharing here. Maybe the reality is that there's alot of tacit ripping-off going on, but FTPOTD, we're sharing. Also, Davebo, again IMO, saying "it could happen" is much different from saying whether it's very likely to happen. I'm too lazy to try and find stats, but I assume that MY's point is that it's just not very likely that either of those (admittedly bone-chilling) scenarios will come to pass.

If you were someone who, just this morning, got a warning from your ISP about BitTorrenting Sunday's Sopranos episode, you might want to go looking for other net connections to connect to. And then those people would get warnings next week. For instance. So don't be the person who gets broken into. Unless you live near me. No, don't. It's wrong.

I guess I should have been a bit more careful in adding the appropriate caveats. So yes, I agree with the point that you should change the default administrative password to avoid having your access point hi-jacked. But if you're administering your access point correctly, you can make it an open network without running the risk of someone changing your settings.

As for the FBI showing up at your door because somebody downloaded kiddy porn, well yeah, that could happen. However, it seems extremely unlikely. And even in the unlikely event that it did occur, it seems unlikely that the FBI could convict based solely on the fact that some kiddy porn was downloaded to a particular IP address. Presumably the FBI would seize your computers, fail to find any kiddy porn on them, and drop the case.

And finally, yes, if you have computers on your network that aren't locked down properly, leaving your network open could allow someone to drive by and compromise them. However, the solution to this is to lock down your computers properly. In particular, if you've got a laptop, you're probably logging into all sorts of different networks where your computer will be exposed to the computers of strangers. Locking down your home network won't do anything to stop someone from hacking into your laptop at Starbucks.

"I agree with torrentprime that MAC address filtering is the way to go ... I also turn off the SSID-broadcast."

'Tis my precise stratagem.

What must the telecoms think about THIS then?

http://www.fon.com/en/

Seems more efficient to me. I have a pet theory that most businesses create little nodes of inefficiency in an economy and then guard it zealously.

The RIAA does now file lawsuits based on apparent IP addresses, saying "Things we claim to own were downloaded here, so it's your fault." I'm aware so far of one serious effort to bite back with the threat of malicious prosecution that got the suit dropped, but they continue to try to intimidate anyone they can with it.

If the telecoms don't have an effective way to price demand, because one guy's home network is a neighborhood network, while the next guy's supports just one computer, how is that in my best interest?

Regardless of how you feel about telecoms in general, at some point they are entitled to make a reasonable return on their investment, else they'll stop investing, then where would we be?

While a little anarchy seems like a good thing, ultimately it's going to come back to bite us.

Yeah, and all the practical performance stuff that everyone else said. Though you could set up your network so that you turn off access when you want to use it and share it when you're off-line. You do go off-line don't you?

We can always take a look at this guy's solution to his neighbor stealing internet - have his router flip or blur all images downloaded. The screenshots are amusing.

One could also easily imagine a situation where appropriate scripts are written to allow casual surfing but discourage certain types of behavior online. Unfortunately, most people don't have the skills or patience to actually do this - there are enough people who don't know how to encrypt their wifi, much less use MAC filters or these blur scripts.

Leaving the access point open doesn't imply leaving the router open. Lots of us leave the AP open and password protect it so nobody can come in and dick with the settings. It still allows neighbors and passers-by to use the connection. Most of us don't have any real reason to add password protection or MAC filtering. If you are one of the special ones, by all means do it. The rest of us should allow sharing. It makes the world better in a teeny tiny way.

Don N.

The CEO of much-loathed-in-techie-land software company SCO has some thoughts about how to solve this "problem".

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