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Your WiFi password is only useful for someone who is within 100 feet of your house. If you have federal agents surveilling you from 100 feet away you have way b
by guelo 13y ago
Your WiFi password is only useful for someone who is within 100 feet of your house. If you have federal agents surveilling you from 100 feet away you have way bigger problems than your WiFi password.
- brudgers 13y agoIn general, I agree that distance is a factor. However, the range at which signals can be intercepted is substantially greater and repeating and recording equipment also comes into play. As do actors other than Federal agents.
- LaGrange 13y agoWhile I don't like at all the idea of government surveillance without court order, I find the idea of corporate surveillance even more horrifying. Actually, this is what amuses me in the whole privacy affair. So a bunch of companies were using and abusing your data to target ads at you and shape your news stream so that it's more addictive, and people were cheering. A government (still mostly democratic, though not from my non-US perspective) is revealed to snoop on people illegally and people rage. I don't actually question the rage – but I see the complacent acceptance of the private companies using the same data as amusing. A large part (not whole, though) of what NSA does is taking your stuff from the place it already shouldn't have been. We're complaining about a fireplace in a burning forest.
- anywherenotes 13y agocurrent government is irrelevant. The data captured now will exist likely forever. If at any point there's a new leader who wants to wipe out a race, he'll have much easier time than checking everyone's papers. I don't mind getting targeted ads, I prefer them to spam ads.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIf all things are equal, then I too prefer targeted ads to non-targeted ads (I'm not going along with the "spam ads" labelling because all ads are spam). However, if it's a choice between a company having all my private data and sending me targeted ads, and the opposite of each, I tend to lean towards the latter.
- dominotw 13y agoI dont really see your logic, Gubment can put you in prison, take your rights away, companies targeting ads can't. It makes sense that one would be outraged at the former.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIt's spelt "government". Spelling it "Gubment" doesn't suddenly turn everyone who's reading your comment against the notion of an elected democracy, it just makes you look stupid. And the reason that it's much scarier if private companies abuse privacy than if the government does it, is that you yourself decide who the government is. You don't get that right wrt a private company.
- eric_the_read 13y agoIf we're getting cranky about spelling, it's "spelled". Spelt is an ancient variety of wheat. "Gubment" is pretty silly, though.
- anamexis 13y agoAs long as we're continuing to be cranky about spelling, "spelt" is a perfectly valid British spelling of the past participle of spell.
- eric_the_read 13y agoYeah, but you guys went and replaced the perfectly cromulent "aluminum" with "aluminium", so already I am suspicious.
- dreamfactory 13y agoaluminum sounds illiterate
- omarchowdhury 13y agoLaughing My Ass Off
- cavilling_elite 13y agoI think most of your repliers are forgetting about Blackwater. (/tinfoil-hat)
- legitsource 13y agoWho is paying them and giving out assignments?
- sentenza 13y agoInterestingly, here in Germany, the "average person" was much more concerned about data collection by Facebook and Google than by governments. (We even had a heated debate about Google Streetview in the mainstream press.) Then the NSA/GCHQ/BND scandal hit and (at least as far as I can tell) now completely overshadows that former concern.
- darkarmani 13y agoHouse? What about in a large office building in NYC?
- ChuckMcM 13y agoActually its from further away than that with a high gain directional antenna (I've hit WiFi hot spots about a mile distant using same) but the point is that they can do this from outside your property. You would probably know if someone was in your house but you'd be hard pressed to notice a Yagi antenna pointed at your window from across the street or down the block a bit. That said, I read the article more as 'yet another reason this whole compelling third parties is an issue' sorts of reasoning as opposed to this is some new threat that we didn't know about. The author points out it has been covered in lots of places. The argument is that more for the folks who aren't thinking they are affected by this because they aren't dissidents or people of interest (yet).
- ISL 13y agoEspecially if that Yagi antenna is on the other side of an RF-transparent wall (most walls are).
- gonzo 13y agoMost walls are not RF transparent, though they don't offer much pan loss, there is some.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoFor those wondering this looks like the antenna I have : http://www.ccrane.com/antennas/wifi-antennas/point-to-point-wifi-antenna.aspx#.UjNHZtdj3mE http://www.ccrane.com/antennas/wifi-antennas/point-to-point-... and we use it for its "intended" purpose which is getting on to the wifi of the camp host at a camp ground :-)
- stephengillie 13y agoAnd similar performance can be had from a 46oz can of soup or chili (retail value: $1.59), with a 1.25" wire sticking through about 1.25" away from the back end, as the antenna for a wifi adapter. #cantenna
- 13y ago
- droopybuns 13y agoSome wifi routers have Internet facing management interfaces that use the same password as the wifi network. Your curt response oversimplifies the situation to the point where an uninformed reader could mistakenly believe the situation has no impact. Your comment should be read in the light of an engineer not only completely missing the point, but an example of the danger of this type of engineering analysis. Minor technical decisions that "make sense" sometimes have severe technical repercussions.
- larsbot 13y agoI wish! My wifi password at work is useful over a much larger area. It is also the login password for my email, the course management system I use when teaching, and pretty much everything else job related. I work at a university "powering silicon valley." You would think they might be a little more careful about things like that...
- rch 13y agoAren't most wi-fi networks trivial to crack anyway?
- stinos 13y agowondered this as well. I've heard numerous time that there are super simple programs out there that give you the password within minutes. No idea if there is any truth in it though.
- ladzoppelin 13y agoThe WPS flaw has been patched in a bunch of routers however the program Reaver was able to exploit it rather quickly.
- Yoshi- 13y agoFor WEP this is true, for WPA/WPA2 without WPS it is much harder. WPA2 uses PBKDF2 with 4096 iterations of HMAC-SHA1, this is a rather slow algorithm. On (http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/ http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-plus/) you can find some values on how slow it is. The same computer can crack 7 billion md5 hash per seconds, but it can barely do 181 thousand WPA2 password per second. At this speed you would need more than 200 days just to crack a 7 letter password only using a-zA-Z0-9. And more than 38 years to crack an 8 letter password. If your password is a word or derivation of a word, you can obviously get it much faster with a dictionary attack.
- kaoD 13y agoProbably not, even for inexperienced users. WEP was flawed but it's been rolled out already and most ISPs configure routers with proper WPA-PSK and long passphrases.
- mistercow 13y agoThat depends on the router and configuration. There's a flaw in WPS that makes it possible to quickly crack a router that has it enabled, even if it's using WPA/WPA2.
- ohazi 13y agoI'd like to point out that Google also has devices that they control within 100 feet of almost every WiFi hotspot in the world.
- blhack 13y agoWhat?
- sliverstorm 13y agoHe's probably talking about Android.
- dlitz 13y agoIt's basically true, though. Google install arbitrary Android apps on nearly any Android phone without user interaction. Source: If you log in to https://play.google.com https://play.google.com from a desktop computer, you can install apps on your phone. You get the permissions dialog on the website (on your desktop computer), not on your phone.
- Mindless2112 13y agoAlso, if you have the Google Play Store then you have Google Play Services which auto-updates without user interaction or notification and has almost unrestricted access to the device.
- nevi-me 13y agoWell, good thing that we have Android Police and their teardowns acting as a control, that way they'll spot something when Google pushes an NSA trojan to Play Services. /s?
- Oletros 13y ago> Google install arbitrary Android apps on nearly any Android phone without user interaction. How they install them?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ibudiallo 13y agoI always thought of this as a feature, and a good feature when your phone is reset.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoI used to get my wifi from over 2 kilometers away with a satellite dish and a usb dongle.