pyrothebouncer's Journal: Personal Wifi network, To lock or to Keep Open?

I wanted to hear from the slashdot community whether it is still important to have a locked wifi network for personal (home) wifi, or if there is still a great threat of hackers jumping on your open wifi network and stealing your info or bandwidth.

I have a friend who works for a contracted company that works with Homeland Security (US) and he thinks it is greatly important to have a locked wifi network because people could hack into your personal data or steal bandwidth. I don't think that is so much the case. I think it is still important to have a locked wifi network at work, but that if it is your home network it is not as important.

I also don't think that neighbors stealing bandwidth is that great of an issue either. I consider myself to be a bandwidth hog, I am constantly uploading and downloading stuff while surfing the web and using my iPod touch on our wifi network at my parent's house. Often my father and mother and maybe someone else will be on and I don't see much of a slow down. So I don't think that a neighbor would be so much of a problem. Am I wrong?

Comments would be awesome!

How Secure Are the Systems On Your Network?

[damn_registrars]

If the systems on your network are reasonably secured, then you shouldn't have much to worry about. It seems like you aren't worried about bandwidth, so you probably can get by with leaving it wide open.
R Unless of course you live in an area where war-driving is a legitimate concern - at which point you should be concerned about what people might do with your bandwidth when you aren't around. I happen to live in an area where my neighbors are too far away to access my AP, and anyone dumb enough to stop t

Re:

[damn_registrars]

Crap I clearly should have used preview that time. Somehow a tag that should have been "br" ended up only "b". My bad.