When we moved into our house a year and a half ago, I bought a bunch of wireless network extenders and whatnot to accommodate our house’s weird floor plan. Plugging in wireless extenders on every level of our house lit up our entire neighborhood with our network’s mighty wireless signal. And when I set that stuff up, I intentionally left the wireless network open. My reasoning at the time was that we were paying for a fat enough pipe so we probably wouldn’t notice if some of you occasionally used the network to check your mail. And besides, wireless security schemes like WEP just make the network more of a pain to set up (and they aren’t really secure anyway).
This all worked well until today, when I got a DMCA takedown notice forwarded from our ISP. The infringement wasn’t anything that we did, it was for a feature film that one of you had downloaded using Bittorrent on our wireless network.
Using a borrowed wireless network to do stuff that could get us sued makes you a complete ninnyhammer, and it makes me feel like a clod for being so generous.
So, enjoy paying for your internet access henceforth, my neighbors. I can’t leave our wireless network open for you anymore because it’s attracting mindless Hollywood lawyers. I’ll be installing a new router with MAC address filtering in the next few days.
Smooches,
Jeffrey
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MAC filtering is pretty easy to get around for determined neighbours — a better defense would be use use WPA with a 64-character hex key (not a passphrase, which are much easier to crack). That’s assuming all of your network devices support WPA, of course.
See, that’s the other part that spooks me out, I have no way of knowing in advance if all my devices support WPA, and even if they do, I’m not sure I want to spend hours configuring each one. The two devices I’m worried about most here are the Tivo and the Wii.
I suspect my neighbors won’t crack whatever I come up with (they seem like they’re lazy/dumb rather than underhanded/sophisticated). But I do need to come up with something.
Ugh, that sucks. I have an open wireless network for the same reasons, and I’ve ongoingly resisted closing it. Guess I should think about it some more.