Benefit of the Doubt
My cousin's wireless network was hacked over the weekend. He gave me a call asking what to do. Basically, he had left his network open and knew his neighbours were using his internet connection, but didn't really worry about it. Then, someone took the liberty of securing his network for him. We were both pretty outraged by this... I mean using his connection is one thing, but locking him out of his own service?
He called me up asking for help reclaiming the router and then securing it for himself. It had been a rough week for him with someone hacking into his Facebook account earlier, and I think he had had enough. We reset the router and enabled security. When he tried to log into the network, he kept running into problems. I tried helping as best as I could, but there's only so much troubleshooting I can do over the phone. We decided that I'd just visit one night after work and try to get things running.
Tonight I did that and we had everything running pretty quickly. It turned out that his network ID was still the default and when I changed that to something unique we found at least one other network with the default name. After I explained this to him, he asked, "do you think they were just trying to secure their network and accidentally locked me out of mine? Even if it's a slight chance, I'd still like to think the best of my neighbours."
It was a great point and something I hadn't thought of. Why couldn't this be an accident? I talk about trusting other people, but my first instinct is never to open up to anyone. In the middle of a rough patch, my cousin is able to give the benefit of the doubt. I want to do that too.
He called me up asking for help reclaiming the router and then securing it for himself. It had been a rough week for him with someone hacking into his Facebook account earlier, and I think he had had enough. We reset the router and enabled security. When he tried to log into the network, he kept running into problems. I tried helping as best as I could, but there's only so much troubleshooting I can do over the phone. We decided that I'd just visit one night after work and try to get things running.
Tonight I did that and we had everything running pretty quickly. It turned out that his network ID was still the default and when I changed that to something unique we found at least one other network with the default name. After I explained this to him, he asked, "do you think they were just trying to secure their network and accidentally locked me out of mine? Even if it's a slight chance, I'd still like to think the best of my neighbours."
It was a great point and something I hadn't thought of. Why couldn't this be an accident? I talk about trusting other people, but my first instinct is never to open up to anyone. In the middle of a rough patch, my cousin is able to give the benefit of the doubt. I want to do that too.