[vox-tech] Wi-fi issue

[Chris Jenks]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2015, Bill Kendrick wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 08:40:34AM -0700, Chris Jenks wrote:
> <snip>
>> [...] what I see 
>> on the airwaves is that almost everybody assumes that bandwidth has to be 
>> "owned". As long as we are so into ownership for its own sake - which I 
>> think is the main motivation for password-locking wifi - we may as well go 
>> back to proprietary software too, make this a pugod list.
>
> Doing things that will prevent a bad guy from breaking into anything
> from my email, to my Facebook profile, to my credit union account or
> other financial services, just seems like common sense.
> Sorry, but as a co-founder of this club, I took a little bit of offense to
> the statement above.

   Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. I appreciate your copious contributions 
to this list over the last many years. I just don't understand why making 
wifi available for strangers to use has to invariably mean that my own use 
of that wifi, or associated network, must be insecure. Is that truly 
impossible to fix? Or are we talking about two different things? I'm not 
saying that wifi shouldn't happen over unencrypted connections. I'm just 
saying that I don't like the trend I see of previously shared recources 
becoming private and, in some emergencies, unavailable, like public 
restrooms going out of style, etc.

> One of the benefits of open source is transparency in how things work,
> how to secure things for your own safety & privacy, and how to help
> others do the same.

   Exactly, which is why I would hope an optimal solution could be found, 
as making source open facilitates not just the enhancement of security but 
also functionality. In a perfect world, it seems like there would at least 
be a few hundred bytes/s of someone's deliberately shared wifi available 
to help a lost driver whose cell data is out. Locking everything down is 
not without cost, but it gets harder to see the cost as we get used to 
paying it every day.

   Yours,

     Chris