A convicted British paedophile has been sentenced to 85 years in an American prison for running an online exchange of child abuse images while he was on probation.Comcast, in particular, will give out wireless modems that have two networks: One private one for your use and one general one for "xfinity". If your modem has two such networks, you can shut off the public one.
Domminich Shaw used the unprotected wireless internet connections of his neighbours in west London to traffic in dozens of videos and pictures of babies and toddlers being sexually abused.
And you should. Make it harder for assholes like that to do their evil work.
The Comcast "public" routers require you to log in with your Comcast username and password, so they aren't anonymous by any means -- if the Feds ever trace back the IP address, Comcast can give them the name and address of whoever was logged into the router at that time. I don't happen to have one of the Comcast routers because I provided my own hardware, but if I did, I would have no problem with leaving it on so that any Comcast customer in the business park across the street could use it. The cable channels used for the public wifi aren't the same as the cable channels used for customer Internet service, so it isn't as if it slows down my own connection, after all.
ReplyDeleteAs for my own wifi, it is quite well secured, thank you very much. I have no desire to have Federal goons crashing through my front door and rifling through my underwear drawer. For one thing, I have enough computer equipment lying around that they'd be certain they'd managed to crash the hideout of a notorious e-terrorist gang and confiscate it all, and just ask Steve Jackson what the FBI does with confiscated gear -- i.e., even if you get it back at some point in the future, you'll get it back in unusable pieces.