Leaving my wifi open for the world

For my home I want to be a nice neighbor actually I have let my wifi open for the past maybe 6 or 7 years. I know that WEP, etc can be cracked within a couple of minutes but my neighbors son who works in IT told his mom and she told me that I am doing bad things and you know the story..

Do you think it's okay to leave your wifi open to the public? I live in a suburb with a tiny street and about 8 houses in reach of my wifi. I have a 16k DSL line so if some one joins me for a couple hours I would probably not notice.

I would love your thoughts on whether I should encrypt my wifi or not.

I admire your altruistic notions of providing WiFi to those who need it - but you are leaving yourself open to huge exposure.

The RIAA et al will still hold you responsible for what they download, since you are here, I presume you are an IT person, hence an unsecured WiFI connection will not be a particularly good defense! Secondly there are worse things than movies people can download - do you want the hassle of having to prove YOU did not download those pictures?

Perhaps get the OpenWRT or similar firmware (if needed) and at least log what others download just in case - delete them (obviously without reading them) after 3-4 months?

Security author Bruce Schneier leaves his personal network open, arguing that wireless encryption gives a false sense of security. He says:

I'm also unmoved by those who say I'm putting my own data at risk, because hackers might park in front of my house, log on to my open network and eavesdrop on my internet traffic or break into my computers. This is true, but my computers are much more at risk when I use them on wireless networks in airports, coffee shops and other public places. If I configure my computer to be secure regardless of the network it's on, then it simply doesn't matter. And if my computer isn't secure on a public network, securing my own network isn't going to reduce my risk very much.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html

Wether it is wise or not, even celebrity security experts seem to leave their home wifi open for all.

The pro's are:

• It is a "neighborly" thing to do. Anyone likes finding a connection to quickly get an email fix or look something up on the net. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" as it were.

The con's:

• Setting it up so that a worm laden machine connecting to your LAN does not infect your machines is beyond the interests and skills of most people.
• If the connection is abused, this could mean being sucked into an investigation.
• Some ISPs explicitly forbid it in their terms of service

If you like the open access idea, you might want to create a separate "visitors" network using that old 801.11b router you have lying around from before you upgraded, and keep your shiny new n router for your own LAN.

_{(source: ask-leo.com)}