For as long as we’ve lived in this house I’ve tried to keep our wireless network open. My feeling has always been that access to the internet should be free and high speed whenever possible. And since I love open wireless networks when I travel I thought it was only fair that I shared in the love.
But the flip side is the weirdness of someone you don’t know sitting outside your house on a laptop. You wonder… what are they doing? Are they trying to hack my home network? Are they trying to look at pictures of my kids?
This morning I saw some creepy guy slither out of the driver side of his minivan and get in the backseat, reaching for his laptop. I’m not an expert at picking out pedophiles but I do watch To Catch a Predator on MSNBC and I started to feel like Chris Hansen. To test this theory I walked to the basement and powered off our wireless router. Sure enough, in about 5 minutes he crawled away.
When I powered it back up, I just went to the configuration IP and set a password. Sure, I know WEP can be cracked by anyone… but I just feel slightly better about it now.
I know several people come over to use our house as a wifi tea room. You all are still invited! I’ll just give you my password.
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