> Security isn't high on the list of concerns, cows out number > people at least 5 to 1, the town does have a stop light and > it works. I wasn't really concerned with being safe as much > as not "breaking" the Internet for our hosts. The mom there > is talking about getting a laptop/netbook eventually.
Security when connected to the internet is always a concern. I have an acquaintance, who insisted that he could get by with WEP on his router, since he had trees for neighbors and not much else. He was shocked one day to see that his throughput had dropped drastically, since he was home alone. When he finally checked the router, he discovered that someone else was using his router to download a file using bit-torrent. Someone had broken his WEP protection and going to town. He never did figure out where the downloader was, but he's now a firm believer in WPA2 with a long pre-shared key. He also disables wireless whenever nobody in the house is using a laptop. I also note that computers without any firewall protection are vulnerable to all kinds of things, including trojans, folks accessing the files on the computer from let's say Russia, and other kinds of ills. The internet makes everyone live in the electronic equivalent of Tokyo even if no neighbors are apparently nearby. That's precisely why I suggested a router with relatively strong protection for usage with a DMZ if the modem/firewall provided can't be bridged easily and a router then put to use. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
