Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
is someone stealing my bandwidth?
iphigenie:
You are right about the security but...
I have several PCs upstairs and it gets pricey to plug them all with wifi cards.
Also I threw away 2 netgear (router and bridge) about a year ago as they just would not work reliably when 2 people played WoW on the network. Swapped for another brand and never had a disconnect again. It took netgear about 12 months to admit that they had a bug with WoW so I will not trust them for a while :S I'd stick with Asus or Zyxel but yes, I get your message. I could spend about £200 upgrading my kit just to prevent someone snooping/stealing my bandwidth.
But my PCs are very secure so all that can happen is them nicking some of my bandwidth for a short while... when my neighbours are much easier to attack (default passwords on routers!!!) so why should I bother? Especially considering I am putting cat6/cat7 cable in the walls and just need to take the time to plug it all in
I would never recommend anyone set up unsecured networks unless their pcs are very secure and they have a good reason. But you do get more performance that way, so there are a lot more unsecured networks out there than people ever expected.
Carol Haynes:
But my PCs are very secure so all that can happen is them nicking some of my bandwidth for a short while...
--- End quote ---
May not seem like a big deal but it is ... if someone sits outside your house (or your neighbours) stealing your bandwidth and do something illegal (like downloading child pornography, uploading/downloading copyright music of video, running file sharing software for nefarious purposes) it will be you that the police come after because everything will track back to your IP address. OK so you may live somewhere that it is unlikely but some criminals literally drive around searching for unsecured bandwidth.
Some people have got into serious trouble with this in the UK and some countries are now starting to look at making unsecured WiFi networks illegal.
tomos:
f0dder:
May not seem like a big deal but it is ... if someone sits outside your house (or your neighbours) stealing your bandwidth and do something illegal (like downloading child pornography, uploading/downloading copyright music of video, running file sharing software for nefarious purposes) it will be you that the police come after because everything will track back to your IP address. OK so you may live somewhere that it is unlikely but some criminals literally drive around searching for unsecured bandwidth.
Some people have got into serious trouble with this in the UK and some countries are now starting to look at making unsecured WiFi networks illegal.
-Carol Haynes (January 10, 2008, 11:42 AM)
--- End quote ---
Wasn't UK law changed so the person owning the WiFi is responsible for the data traffic, even if it was hax0red by someone else, or was that just a proposal or a nightmare of mine? :)
Carol Haynes:
Isn't that what I said? Sorry if it wasn't clear.
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