16 Oct
2022
16 Oct
'22
11:04 p.m.
I think we'd be doing people a disservice by pretending that we're providing a
"secure" internet connection. The Omni doesn't have a closed network
infrastructure and you know as well as I do that anyone can connect anything to
the network and monitor any connections. If people want the illusion of
security, they should get it from AT&T or whoever they pay for cellular
service.
Giving people a password-protected wifi network for the purpose of "security"
would be taking advantage of peoples lack of knowledge about computer and
network security, purely for the purpose of making our own lives easier so that
we don't have to have the conversation. You konw as well as I do that the
"hackers" are just as likely to be somewhere else on the internet (domestic or
international) as they are to be inside the building, and a user's
countermeasures are no different for one or the other.
I think we provide a valuable service to people by not lying to them about the
internet.
-jake
On Sun, 16 Oct 2022, Yardena Cohen via sudo-discuss wrote:
We've gotten many complaints recently about
omni's wifi being totally open
and not password protected. Many folks are afraid of their devices being
attacked if they join our network. And tbh I don't blame them.
I think we should offer a wpa-protected network for those who want one. But
I don't have the capacity to work on that. Does it sound fun to anybody
else?
We used to have a private subnet which would have made this easier, but it
got unceremoniously merged with the public one a few years ago. One useful
side task would be to identify and label all the ethernet cables running
out of our one remaining switch. Some of them could provide the backbone of
a new network.