> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Victor Odhner > wrote: >> I’m really annoyed that so many companies offer open WIFI when it >> would be >> so easy to secure those hot spots. Restaurants, hotels, and the >> waiting >> rooms of auto dealerships are almost 100% open. [snip] On 2017-03-20 13:20, Stephen Partington wrote: > This is usually done as a means to be easy for their customers. Pretty much this. Convenience is more valuable than security in most people's minds. >> they’d be happy to do the right thing if we could explain it to the >> right people. I'm not sure this would happen. Setting up passwords and then distributing those passwords has a non-zero cost and offers zero visible benefits for most of the people who are using the wireless networks.[0] And as another poster said, what about football/baseball stadiums? Distributing passwords to tens of thousands of people is sort of difficult. "Just watching the game" is not an option; people want to FaceTweet pictures of themselves at the game. OTOH, the last time I looked at the access points visible from my living room, almost all of them had some sort of access control enabled. Maybe there's a social convention forming that "my access point" ~= "my back yard" and "open access point" ~= "a public park"? [0] Having a more educated user population would make the benefits more visible, but it's very difficult to make people care about these things. -- Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress There is no Darkness in Eternity But only Light too dim for us to see. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss