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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

I leave my wifi open because I like being a nice neighbor. A little QoS and a firewall for my home network, and you're free to connect.

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I don't. I put the password in the SSID, as a form of a captcha. Any marginally intelligent human would break it, but an automated system sniffing out unprotected wifi won't.

I've always wondered if leaving your WiFi open gives you plausible deniability WRT to torrenting copyrighted material (should anyone ever come knocking).

AFAIK it's always been one of the bigger gray areas regarding pirating copyrighted material. From what I've read it's still a "we have no formal proof that people are prosecuted based on it, but we also have no proof that they aren't/can't be".

Also, read https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel... as linked below in this thread.

It is from 2008 though, things have changed. Just today a domain was seized by the UK govt on grounds of copyright infringement just because it was running a proxy. In Austria someone was convicted for running a Tor exit node about a month ago.

I doubt it makes a difference. Just having some server logs and an IP isn't really sufficient proof in the first place. Just because web requests come from my IP doesn't mean that I made those requests (it could be a friend, relative, hacker).

Computer forensics would be required to link the requests to a specific computer and person. Your ISP is probably still free to just ban you though.

If a murder weapon is found in your house, you're going to have a really hard time explaining that "I was just holding it for a friend."

Just sayin' ...

That's a terrible analogy. Courts in the US have been widely rejecting IPs as the basis of copyright lawsuits, see:

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2014/03/25/florida-judge-rejects...

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security/297475-ip-address-no...

http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/10/court_nukes_ano...

P.S. Downvotes on HN do not mean "I disagree".

I think the EFF has been pushing this idea recently.

They have, but it only concerns the USA, completely ignoring the rest of the world while still calling on everyone to open their networks. Understandable as they're an American organization, but annoying as a non-American. Almost as annoying as the NSA considering anyone with a non-American IP address a potential terrorist.

And you're free to sniff my traffic and hack my phone :) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151516>

What if your neighbors (or anyone else) look up something illegal on your Wi-Fi?

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