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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

> I have a sign at my front door with the QR code

Why not just have an open WiFi network? I stubbornly have kept my network open since my very first Linksys WRT54G router. Am I some kind of internet hippy for feeling like networks should be open and we'd all be better off if we shared with our neighbors? Over the years, I've probably wasted an hours of my life searching for and struggling to correctly enter complex WiFi passwords.

Although truth be told, I think it's primarily that I don't want to bothered giving WiFi passwords to my guests:)

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> Why not just have an open WiFi network?

I used to do that for a long time. It was great for guests and also for plausible denaiblity if I every got a nastygram from my ISP.

But the liability just got to great and the plausible deniability argument got pretty weak. And also, with so many neighbors with devices that will just auto join open networks, I started seeing strange traffic a lot, most likely from neighbors connecting accidentally.

At the end of the day, making it super easy for guests inside my house without being totally open works out well.

> Why not just have an open Wi-Fi network?

Because I don't want the creepy neighbor kid to do something on my guest network that will get me a visit from the cops or a letter from my ISP. Sure, guests could do that, but they'd be a lot less anonymous in the process.

> the creepy neighbor kid to do something on my guest network that will get me a visit from the cops

Think about it. Honestly, what are the odds of that? I'm sure the last time I got in my car (to get a coffee) it was 100x more risky than that (actually it was snowing, make it 1000x). And so what? They show up, I'd tell pull open their phones and connect to my network. I did nothing wrong, have at it wasting my tax dollars. After all is said and done in that 1-in-a-million incident, still less of my life wasted with than if I bothered with annoying WiFi passwords over these decades.

Your comment reminds me of my friends and family who keep their kids locked up (pre-COVID), depriving them of the opportunity to learn independence that I had growing up. Just like when I was a kid, there is no crime in my neighbor and yet people act like their kid will have a 10% chance of being kidnapped if they let him go to the local convenience store, when in reality the odds are closer to 1 in 100 million. Social media or local news has screwed up our society's ability to calculate risk/rewards.

That's a bit extreme. I wouldn't operate open WiFi if I lived in USA, because law enforcement is notoriously over zealous and they are big on saving the children.

Here in Canada, I'm comfortable knowing the cops won't show up in military surplus and shoot me before I can explain.

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