[wsfii-discuss] Fwd: [india-gii] poor WiFi encryption a security risk

Mon Sep 22 07:48:47 UTC 2008

I agree that these are valuable lessons, and that people are learning
them to some degree. I'm not saying people are too stupid to know about
the increased risk of insecure WiFi. They read about it in the news and
perhaps have taken available precautions (like WPA at home). 

However, I do think it is too much to expect your average user to know
what to do about it. Those of us with IT skills, access to IT support
staff, or the money to spend on personal firewall and VPN software and
services have some options... what about everybody else? 

If I asked my mom whether or not she is using POP or IMAP and if it goes
over SSL, she would have to call Dell support to ask. Yet, she is
expected to know how to protect herself on an insecure LAN? Her only
realistic options are to either ignore security concerns or to not use
the network at all. Somehow I doubt most WiFi operators promote that
last option in their literature :)

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 22:52 +0200, Ramon Roca wrote:
> En/na wlanmac ha escrit:
> >
> > What is the lesson we are hoping to teach people?
> >
> >
> >   
> Very simple,
> 
> Teach the people to distinguish between a private network, and the 
> public networks.
> 
>     * Private networks very lokely should be protected.
>     * At public networks, others can be listening, so depending of what
>       you are doing, users might want to encrypt their communications.
> 
> 
> Same logic as internet or many other things. Quite understandable.
> 
> What's wrong to be under the assumption that people is stupid.
> 
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