Open Wireless Networks
January 15th, 2008
Bruce Schneier writes about the open wireless network in his house and why he thinks it’s not a big deal or even “basic politeness”.
In contrast to Bruce I am concerned about other people using my connectivity. Not because I’ll get sued, but because I don’t like to share my connection with everyone. I don’t like debugging why my connection is slow just to find out someone is downloading stuff through my connection.
I configure my network with a WPA2 key that I can provide to guests. Most computers will store this key and remember it next time, so this is kind of a first-time-guest thing. No big deal I guess, but in case I’d run a public venue like a coffee shop, I’d definitely keep the access point open, because that’s the whole point and everything else would just be a support headache. In addition, people will start to complain if they paid for it and it’s not working, so it’s probably cheaper to not charge and have a less reliable solution.