Sharing Wireless

[Bradyams]

Today a neighbor came over who is renting out the basement from a family friend, and they don't have the internet, but he needs it. He noticed we had wireless, and wants to pay us to be able to use it. I have a few concerns.

1. In the rare event the cable company found out about this, does this break any terms or conditions?

2. If he got caught for downloading music or god forbid, child porn, it would be on us, not him, wouldn't it?

3. Could he gain access to the information we are sending over the wireless network with our own computers? I'm hooked up directly to the router with an ethernet cord, could he get any of my information? This is obviously a huge concern with my NETeller, and poker passwords. Could I somehow monitor his activity?

I think our internet bill is $40/mo, and there are five of us who split it. So that's $8/mo for each of us. If we decided to do this what do you think we should ask from him? I think $20/mo sounds fair.

Thanks

[IHateKeithSmart]

1. Depends on your carrier, but most likely yes.

2. This is still a gray area, but given that you'd essentially be his provider, you could be liable.

3. Yes. RE: monitoring his activity, also yes (though non-trivial).

RE: the charges - I think $20 or $25 would be fine.

[StevieG]

[ QUOTE ]

1. In the rare event the cable company found out about this, does this break any terms or conditions?


[/ QUOTE ]

Probably. You are almost certainly not allowed to resell. It is unlikely they will ever know, however.

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2. If he got caught for downloading music or god forbid, child porn, it would be on us, not him, wouldn't it?


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The traffic would be traced back to your IP. Your wireless router establishes your own set of addresses, but when talking to the Internet, all the devices connected to that router look the same. You can see this by looking at the headers you send out to this page. (http://www.visi.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~sgrantz/test.pl) Try it from a couple different devices on your network and note how the remote address stays the same.

You could likely establish that the destination once it hit your router was his device, and not yours, but that would be on you to prove.

[ QUOTE ]

3. Could he gain access to the information we are sending over the wireless network with our own computers? I'm hooked up directly to the router with an ethernet cord, could he get any of my information? This is obviously a huge concern with my NETeller, and poker passwords. Could I somehow monitor his activity?


[/ QUOTE ]

Yes, he might be able to capture packets and see any plaintext you are sending on the wireless side (not the wired side). But if there is encryption on top of it (a Web site using HTTPS like NETeller) you should be fine. This also makes his communication equally vulnerable.

[ QUOTE ]

I think our internet bill is $40/mo, and there are five of us who split it. So that's $8/mo for each of us. If we decided to do this what do you think we should ask from him? I think $20/mo sounds fair.


[/ QUOTE ]

That seems decent.

[CrazyN8]

You should be able to look at the logs files for the router and see what the individual in question is doing.

[StevieG]

CrazyN8, which home market wireless routers offer this kind of detailed logging?

I would think the most you would get would be incoming and outgoing port and IP address, and not a long history at that. That's not enough for most people to discern what users on the home network are doing online.

[Mr Gee]

It's an awful lot of hassle for $20 a month. Unless you feel you can really trust the guy, I'd say no because:

1. Probably not allowed by your ISP
2. He may be downloading dodgy stuff
3. You'd need to make sure he couldn't access all the other computers in your house
3. Making sure you get your money every month
4. Making sure he doesn't hog all your bandwidth.

[Bradyams]

[ QUOTE ]
It's an awful lot of hassle for $20 a month. Unless you feel you can really trust the guy, I'd say no because:

1. Probably not allowed by your ISP
2. He may be downloading dodgy stuff
3. You'd need to make sure he couldn't access all the other computers in your house
3. Making sure you get your money every month
4. Making sure he doesn't hog all your bandwidth.

[/ QUOTE ]

1. Definitely a concern
2. Again, a concern. If there's anyway to monitor this stuff I'd appreciate if someone could point in the right direction of doing this, as I have no idea about this stuff.
3. Same as #2
4. That's not much of a problem. I can just say if I don't have the money on a cetain date, I'll change the password or deny access to his computer (if that's possible).
5. He said he wouldn't LAG it up, but if I noticed some LAG I'd have a little chat with him.

I guess I'm mostly concerned about him gaining access to our computers, and what to know how to monitor his activity.

Personally I would recommend against sharing. For the reasons already mentioned by the others here (99.99% likely against your T&C with the ISP, liability issues, etc) but also for the fact of how did he know you had wireless in the 1st place? Did you invite him in once and he saw your router on the desk or does he already know about the wireless network because it came up on his PC when he turned it on? If it's the first then not too scary but if it's the second... has he already used the connection and realized you may have looked at the DHCP log and saw a new IP so he decided to "ask" to use it? All kinds of other issues to think about as well. How well secured are the other machines on the network? In addition to running a packet sniffer to read your traffic he could also break into the systems given enough time and he'd have plenty of it. Why does he "need" internet connectivity that he's not willing to pay full price for his own and not have to share.

Okay so I paint an ugly paranoid picture, it's what I have to do every day. But the facts are, unless you know and trust the guy you are opening yourself and the others in your network (i'm assuming they're roomates) to indetity theft, bandwidth hogging, viruses, etc. Whether you decide to allow it or not make sure that you secure your router. Go here:

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/wifisecurity

for a run down on how to do so.

[Mr Gee]

For network monitoring you'd need a firewall/web proxy device set up between the network and the internet. Something like Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/) isn't too hard to set up if you have a spare old computer lying around. It's free, and it would provide all the logging you would need.

To stop access to your computers I'd recommend some sort of personal firewall on all the machines. The standard Windows XP built in firewall could do the trick, though you might be better off with something like ZoneAlarm.

[Bradyams]

[ QUOTE ]
Personally I would recommend against sharing. For the reasons already mentioned by the others here (99.99% likely against your T&C with the ISP, liability issues, etc) but also for the fact of how did he know you had wireless in the 1st place? Did you invite him in once and he saw your router on the desk or does he already know about the wireless network because it came up on his PC when he turned it on? If it's the first then not too scary but if it's the second... has he already used the connection and realized you may have looked at the DHCP log and saw a new IP so he decided to "ask" to use it? All kinds of other issues to think about as well. How well secured are the other machines on the network? In addition to running a packet sniffer to read your traffic he could also break into the systems given enough time and he'd have plenty of it. Why does he "need" internet connectivity that he's not willing to pay full price for his own and not have to share.

Okay so I paint an ugly paranoid picture, it's what I have to do every day. But the facts are, unless you know and trust the guy you are opening yourself and the others in your network (i'm assuming they're roomates) to indetity theft, bandwidth hogging, viruses, etc. Whether you decide to allow it or not make sure that you secure your router. Go here:

[/ QUOTE ]

He said he was looking for some wireless to use, and saw TheDude (the name of ours), and was wondering if it was ours. I should hav ejust said no, but I said yes. Then that's when he asked. He said he tried all the "tricks of the trade" to try to get into it, but he couldn't. That worries me a lot that he knows this stuff.

My computer is pretty well protected since I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm doing when I'm on the internet, but a couple of my roommates don't know [censored] when it comes to computers.

My computer is probably safe, and the internet is not under my name. It's under my other roommates name, so I think I'd be okay with it. I just want to make sure my roommate know the possibilities of what could happen. I'll check out the links you guys have provided me (thank you very much), and I guess it's up to my roommates.

[cgwahl]

[ QUOTE ]
He said he was looking for some wireless to use, and saw TheDude (the name of ours), and was wondering if it was ours. I should hav ejust said no, but I said yes. Then that's when he asked. He said he tried all the "tricks of the trade" to try to get into it, but he couldn't. That worries me a lot that he knows this stuff.


[/ QUOTE ]


He tried to break into your wireless network and because he couldn't crack it he wants to rent it?

Personally I would just tell him to piss off if he told me that...

[Carl_William]

Don't get involved with this guy -- period. Basically it's cheating or stealing. Also the pain down the road for you could far outweight a monthly $20 (or so) benefit. You don't need a potential MIGRAINE of this nature....

[Bradyams]

You guys are right. No wireless for him!

[CrazyN8]

[ QUOTE ]
CrazyN8, which home market wireless routers offer this kind of detailed logging?

I would think the most you would get would be incoming and outgoing port and IP address, and not a long history at that. That's not enough for most people to discern what users on the home network are doing online.

[/ QUOTE ]

NETGEAR WGR614 or something and I hate it but it was dirt cheap. It shows the site visited, source IP address (assigned by router), time and date. Like this:

[ QUOTE ]
[ALLOW:it.sports.yahoo.com] Source:192.168.0.2 Wednesday, 24 Aug 2005 11:24:03

[/ QUOTE ]

[cgwahl]

Also, unless you have it set this way for a reason you should make it so the router doesn't broadcast its SSID.