
Australian police to patrol streets looking for unsecured wi-fi.  - vaksel
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/the-great--wifi-robbery-police-to-patrol-down-your-street-20090721-drqb.html
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jacquesm
They shouldn't drive in to my street then, there must be 50 open access points
within 100 meters. But then again, I'm not in Australia.

As a response to this if I _were_ in Australia and I had my wi-fi locked down
I'd open it up.

Terrorists, downloaders and pederasts will do their thing regardless of
unsecured wifi routers.

~~~
arohner
> Terrorists, downloaders and pederasts...

Pretty harsh to group all of those in the same group.

~~~
jacquesm
I did that because of the usual reasons that are being trotted out whenever
open wifi is discussed:

\- terrorists might use your open wifi to communicate with each other

\- downloaders are going to use your open wifi so you will get caught for
their crime

\- pederasts will use your open wifi to download child pornography

~~~
poiuytrrew
This is a good reason to open it. With an open wifi there is no good case that
it was you. With a secured wifi - you simply have to convince an 80year old
judge and a jury of sheep shearers of the mechanisms of an attack on a WEP
secured link.

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biohacker42
Australia may be an extreme case but there's plenty of this desire for tight
control going around. From Iran to the US, to Holland, the UK, Germany, etc.

The bottom line is, the cold war struggle between communism and capitalism is
over and fascism won. Fascism briefly lost due to being on the losing side of
WWII but in the long run it's clearly winning.

Everybody look at Singapore that's where we're all going. This:
[http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-
Ourse...](http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-
Death.html) is about us living in a combination of 1984 and a brave new world.
We (except for Singapore) aren't quite there yet in terms of government
control but that's where we're headed. And because it will never be as extreme
or obvious as 1984, there's no need to go that far, nobody will be rioting to
stop it.

The only difference between Iran and Singapore is, Singapore's economy is
strong and they don't bother with tight social restrictions.

------
danw
I like the assumption that wifi shouldn't be open. Why would you want to share
your resources with friends and neighbours?

~~~
Zak
I used to until they started using my network for bittorrent to the point that
it consistently had poor performance.

I'd set something up to throttle bandwidth and restrict certain protocols from
unregistered MACs, but I'm not motivated to make _that_ much of an effort to
share my network.

~~~
froo
The thing about having an Open Wireless connection here in Australia is that
we generally have caps on the amount of bandwidth our internet plans come
with. Once you go over that cap, your connection becomes rate limited and it
feels like you're back in the stoneage.

So, even for that reason, sharing connections here in Aus is a bad idea
because all you need is one bandwidth hog to screw up your internet.

Blame Telstra :(

------
jrockway
In a world with Tor and cheap anonymizing proxies, the criminals are not using
open wifi networks anymore.

