There have been a few threads here on ehMac surrounding the open use of wifi. Up until recently I would have been one to open my system for public access. Having seen this article on Geek.com I will be rethinking my strategy for openning my systems.
Check this out, it's about a man from Toronto who got caught with his pants down (literally) while hacking using an open wifi point.
yeah... we heard about it. My thing is that the Police and other reporters have made such a hoopla of the whole affair as they painted this whole incident as internet service theft - but made it sound so much more alarming - mentioning that as the acct holder (us), we would be on the hook for whatever happened (?!?!). Anyhow, yes there shoud be more security, but this man has a problem - no matter the wifi location. What if he had paid for the access?? what then?
H!
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Perhaps I'm merely paranoid, or perhaps I've been a Windows user for too long, but every time I see a Mac user talk about opening up their WiFi, my reaction is:
"Are you crazy? There are people out there trying to do malicious harm to your computer, your network, yout wifi -- and you're thinking of letting strangers on your connection???"
Perhaps after you've hung out Mac users for a long time, you start to think that the Internet is a happy place, and the world is full of friendly people.
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Sonal, so true! I remember my shock as I set out one day to get a USB driver for my Win 95 installation on VirtualPC. After years of using my Mac almost exclusively and enjoying the internet as a place to go for fun, information and useful software I found myself thrown into a world of victims and victimizers. Warnings everywhere, words I barely knew about like "trojans" and "spyware" being used to describe simple driver downloads. It was scary. I'd rather not have to deal with cr@p like that. Keeps me buying Apple.
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I live in west Toronto, so after that story came out I spent half my Saturday bulletproofing my WiFi setup...which consists of a D-Link wireless router, ADSL modem, a g4 tower, a G4 powerbook and a Dell Inspiron laptop.
--Disabled SSID broadcasting, after setting new name
--Disabled DHCP, set all static IPs
--re-enabled WEP encryption with new key
--enabled MAC (media access control) filtering
--router logs get emailed to me daily
--changed a whole bunch of passwords
...anything else?
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Ohenri, the Macs were fine...the Dell running XP was stuborn, I had to pry it open so I could get back in...
I was never overly paranoid about this, but this creep sent me scrambling...I figure, " where there's one, there's others".
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