For my home I want to be a nice neighbor actually I have let my wifi open for the past maybe 6 or 7 years. I know that WEP, etc can be cracked within a couple of minutes but my neighbors son who works in IT told his mom and she told me that I am doing bad things and you know the story..
Do you think it's okay to leave your wifi open to the public? I live in a suburb with a tiny street and about 8 houses in reach of my wifi. I have a 16k DSL line so if some one joins me for a couple hours I would probably not notice.
I would love your thoughts on whether I should encrypt my wifi or not.
Best Answer
I admire your altruistic notions of providing WiFi to those who need it - but you are leaving yourself open to huge exposure.
The RIAA et al will still hold you responsible for what they download, since you are here, I presume you are an IT person, hence an unsecured WiFI connection will not be a particularly good defense! Secondly there are worse things than movies people can download - do you want the hassle of having to prove YOU did not download those pictures?
Perhaps get the OpenWRT or similar firmware (if needed) and at least log what others download just in case - delete them (obviously without reading them) after 3-4 months?