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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the point of this post - are you saying deauth attacks are fine and everyone should just abandon Wi-Fi?

I am saying not everyone is affected, only those who solely rely on wifi. Others have realized that a shared medium with questionable security is inherently unreliable and have other options at their disposal.

Let me guess, you can also build a better dropbox with curlftpfs

Ethernet is a shared medium as well if you want to talk to other devices on your network. So instead of deauth they do ARP poisoning.

Not in the same way that wifi is, where anyone outside the building can attack it. And even if your ethernet is under attack you have the advantage of being able to physically locate ports.

What's your thoughts on EMP attacks?

Lead vest should be worn around groin. Safety first.

But then they're already inside the house, so to speak. Your neighbors are unlikely to be cabled into your LAN.

True, but if their goal is to kick you offline then sending interference on the coaxial lines might disrupt certain cable providers.

> Others have realized that a shared medium with questionable security is inherently unreliable

The real the8472 would have never said that. Then again without you coming to pin your message on an actual bulletin board for everyone to see you we can neither confirm the authenticity of this message nor of it author. Implicitly its validity is questionable.

> have other options at their disposal

When I tried connecting all the phones, tablets, watches and other such devices in my house to Ethernet cables it proved to be a real hassle for my cat. Do not recommend.

There's value in convenience and it probably outweighs the drawbacks for all but a (very) few specific applications.

Your analogy is flawed, the validity of my argument is independent of whether I am who I claim to be. HN does not require strong identity verification to function.

As for the convenience, I think the same kind of reasoning brought us endless ads and tracking.

> Your analogy is flawed

Of course it isn't. The person making one argument against convenience chose convenience over the massive downsides of using the option with "questionable security" and that is "inherently unreliable". Hence the validity of the claim is undermined. Tomorrow your message might read that "WEP secured WiFi networks are the pinnacle of security and reliability" because dang decided it's a funny thing to do, with little recourse from your side.

The world is not only black or white. You're using the downsides of one extreme as an argument to support the other extreme. Do you realize now that they're both extremes and likely equally wrong?

There's always a balance between security and usability. A sweetspot where the system is convenient to use and still offers as much security as possible. Make it too inconvenient and it's either not used at all or people just end up circumventing all the controls to get that convenience. And this happens ad-hoc, uncontrolled, which is worse.

You seem to mistake this as an either-or-argument. I said that people who realize that wifi is unreliable and insecure will make sure to have other options at their disposal. That does not rule out using wifi when convenient and appropriate (e.g. making a guest wlan available to people who wouldn't trust your ethernet either).

But it should not be the only option since it can't be relied on due to its many problems. Deauth attacks aren't the only issue.

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