Why not to have WiFi in your home at all

[viktor_haag]

Granted, the fine tagged to the law is "only" 100 euro, but frankly the precedent here rather bothers me.

If, while I'm on vacation for a few days, some weasel sneaks onto my property and leeches electricity out of an out-door outlet for some kriminal purpose, I should be liable because I didn't "properly secure my out-door outlet"?

I suppose the answer now is, yes.

I can see that I have a community obligation not to leave cans of gas lying around on my front lawn where anyone could set fire to them (or steal them and use them to set fire to something), baskets of kitchen knives, and so on and so forth.

I suppose the Germans would like to think that this community obligation towards safeguarding my "potentially dangerous civic resources" extends to my WiFi access point to the intarwebz.

Hrm.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Just think of the corollary: you can leave your WiFi on with the default password, download all you want, and then if caught someone else did the downloading, and you only have to pay 100 euros!

::B::

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Interesting point of view, Doc. Not sure it makes me feel better... 8)

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

I had a mild scare once when I found what I thought was a leecher attached to my password-secured wi-fi. This was two routers ago, when wi-fi security was terrible easy to crack, so I have my suspicions that someone was doing an end run around it.

I've since upgraded to a system that uses WPA-2 and have the key renewal set to a short enough period that I doubt it could be cracked easily.