Last Thursday’s post about an Arizona condo development that plans to require safe wireless practices of its owners has sparked quite the debate over at Slashdot with more than 300 comments posted.
Here’s just a sampling:
“Furthermore, this rule would be a total paper tiger, as far as enforcement goes, since WEP [which I do believe is the most common security protocol in use for Wi-Fi today] is widely known NOT to be secure [wikipedia.org]. It will be ironic when the first white hat captures a few days worth of packets from outside that guy’s home and then publishes the unencrypted contents of his web traffic.”
Silly was the least of the insults tossed at this idea.
“This seems silly. If you want to protect your own private property or not, that’s your own business. They don’t require you to lock your apartment door when you leave. They don’t require you to lock your car door when you park in your parking space. How is this any different?”
Apparently there are places that require locked doors, but we digress.
There were cooler heads posting: “In summary, the condo developers are providing the broadband connection and want to make sure that the condo owners secure their endpoints. Open access points have some risks that the developers are apparently not willing to accept. As a goodwill gesture they could retain a local networking firm to help owners set up their wireless networks properly though.”
Don’t miss what 15 members of BuzzBlog Brigade had to say in their posts below (all the headlines begin with “Mandated security”). In general, these folks speak more approvingly of the Arizona condo management’s plan than do the Slashdotters.
