Free Wi-Fi, Public Spaces, and Me

Germany is looking at the provision of free wi-fi hotspots in public spaces. Their most prevalent snag in the process has to do with existing antipiracy guidelines and after all ... the law is the law.

I am frequently asked about providing free wi-fi here in the hood. My data connection is well beyond those of most in my midst and the presence of the two installer trucks parked in my yard for several hours the morning it was installed has made me somewhat of an oddity in these parts.

I get attempts to log into my network via one of the three nodes available —

Less now that my would-be "guests" have a feel for the security implementation and now the requests have gone from hijack attempt to stopping me and asking me why I won't provide the SSID to my fellow denizens of the 300 foot radius supplied by the bodacious router I use. Well, the answer is simple. It's ALMOST like the German conundrum in that it involves the law.

My preventative has more to to do with pervs and less to do with pirates. I'm more afraid of some idiot kiddie porn fool getting traced back to one of my IPs — the long term maintenance of logs ... the possibility for court and bad publicity; and it's just too much trouble to fathom. So I keep the bandwidth and those network access codes strictly private.

There are worse things than being stingy with abundant resources ... Whereas in my younger day I was a fool for others, these days finds me minding my own business and keeping my own counsel regarding what's happening in my technological arena.

There just is no room for some dummy involving themselves illegally over my internet connection in the manner I keep reading about too frequently anymore in the local newspaper. I don't do it. Why should I let them.

I had toyed with giving wifi access to one of my friends who comes over intermittently but decided against that too because the new software in use will make those SSIDs legible to the user and therefore subject to sharing. Heck, windows 10 still has a feature to share those access codes in peer to peer provisioning only recently SAID to be removed via windows update. I'm afraid I'm somewhat brazen in my opposition to even inadvertent advertisement of access credentials.

Nope. No peer to peer. No TOR coming or going. No botnets. No spambots. No suspicious spiders. I'm simply not going to jail because somebody thinks they're sneakier than I am. It's simply not where I want to be. I don't begrudge the access so much as the possibility for going to prison and subsequently becoming some bad man's boyfriend.

Tain't happening.