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Summary: Connectivity is becoming an added "perk" in some housing situations. Make sure you know the risks when someone else provides your internet connection.
I almost said, "just turn on your firewall and you'll be fine". And then it dawned on me that no, you wouldn't be fine. Far from it, in fact. And that's the reason I'm touching on this scenario again, even though we've really discussed this exact problem a couple of times before, albeit with slight differences. • Whoever provides your internet access, be it an open WiFi hotspot, a hotel, your place of employment and even your ISP, can monitor your usage and might allow others on the network to sniff your traffic as well. It doesn't matter whether the connection is wired or wireless. Now, in general, we trust our ISP, and perhaps our employer, but as we've discussed in earlier articles, it's a bad idea to trust hotels and open WiFi hotspots. Both are quite easily abused either by the administrator of the network, or by those willing to sit quietly in a hotel room or corner of the cafe and capture the internet traffic passing by. Doing so they can catch the accounts, passwords, and more, from users who haven't sufficiently protected themselves. "Whoever provides your internet access ... can
monitor your usage and might allow others on the network to sniff your traffic
as well."
As generous as your landlord's offer is, it falls into exactly the same boat:
If this sounds familiar it's because it is: it's exactly the same risk that you run when using an internet cafe. And as such, exactly the same solutions apply:
Given that you'll be connecting this way almost exclusively in your new residence, I'd recommend a VPN as the easiest solution that will essentially take care of protecting everything you do from your landlord and/or neighbors. While I've no direct experience with them, HotSpot VPN and WiTopia are two such providers. (You can also read one comparison between the two here on Michael Horowitz's blog.) On the other hand, getting your own internet connection independent of your landlord might also be worth at least a quick look and cost comparison. Related:
• Recent Comments
Aside from Leo's points, this rings lots of alarm bells for me. I don't know where the person asking the question lives, but I did notice a mention of "house" (as opposed to an apartment building) and a total of three tenants, including himself. I live in southern Brooklyn where unscrupulous practices by landlords are sadly not uncommon. I can easily envision the inquirer's (apparently small-time) landlord sharing a residential broadband with multiple households without permission of the underlying ISP, which is surely a violation of the ISP's terms of use. (After all, the ISP wants to sell broadband to individual households, so they stand to lose revenue in a situation like this.) There are three other problems here: First, if the underlying ISP is a cable provider, even people who connect directly to the cable network can suffer slowdowns during peak hours In fact, this can also happen with DSL, even though DSL connections are supposedly not shared with neighbors. (Google [brooklyn verizon dsl peak slowdowns] for an proof of this). Now you are talking about sharing a single connection which is subject to a "double slowdown" if the other tenants are hitting the Wi-Fi connection hard. The second problem is that, should anything go wrong with the connection, if it should go down completely, let's say, you have additional layers of complication in getting the problem solved. You can't call the underlying ISP directly, and the landlord might have better things to do than deal with Internet connectivity problems. Sure, if the landlord lives in the house and uses the connection himself, it's in his best interest to get such problems solved, but what if he's out of town or something when this happens? Finally, there is the recently-reported case of Roderick Vosburgh, whose home was raided last year in an FBI sting involving posted hyperlinks that purported to be illegal videos of minors having sex. Vosburgh was found guily of attempting to download child pornography and faces three to four years in prison. A CNET article about this case mentions the following: QUOTE: The defendant in [another similar] case, Travis Carter, suggested that any of the neighbors could be using his wireless network. (The public defender's office even sent out an investigator who confirmed that dozens of homes were within Wi-Fi range.) But the magistrate judge ruled that even the possibilities of spoofing or other users of an open Wi-Fi connection "would not have negated a substantial basis for concluding that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of child pornography would be found on the premises to be searched." Translated, that means the search warrant was valid. END QUOTE So, it I were you, I would absolutely, positively get my own Internet connection and steer clear of the Wi-Fi deal completely. Posted by: Kevin Pacheco at March 22, 2008 02:35 AMI try to use WiFi as little as possible and never use my credit card info online if I can avoid it. If you need reason to, check out some clips from a TV show that demonstrates how unscrupulous people can watch your WiFi and steal your credit card info. I can't post links here, so, search youtube for wifi and real hustle. Posted by: bigjohnny at March 23, 2008 05:40 PMI am the "landlord" (NOT the one in the article above). I don't know how to look at my "tenant's" data, but how do I protect myself from my tenant and for that matter someone in another apartment or someone just driving by the apartment building? According to my tenant, there are 8 different networks registering on his laptop (including mine). Because my tenant shares the cost of the connection with me, I feel I have to protect the both of us from "problems." I have a Linksys Wireless-G 2.4 MHz Broadband Router. I am wired directly to the router and my tenant uses the wireless connection. The router itself has a password on it and you need to enter an encryption key to gain access to the network to which my router is attached. Thanks, ERIC Posted by: Eric Goodman at May 1, 2008 05:39 AM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Excellent question, and good on you for wanting to do things Thanks, Leo
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