Sniffers

1. If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?


Luckily I don't have to worry about this. Everything at my house is pasword protected - even the front door (pretty cool actually. Don't need a physical key.)  But if it were the case I would remind her that sending me messages via unprotected wifi would be like being naked with the drapes wide open. 


If my mom was sending me important information or gossiping about the neighbors, "sniffers" could take that info right out of the sky and see it themselves. On top of that, most wifi devices have a 100 ft reach or more. If its isnt password protected, our nieghbors could be stealing our internet and slowing the rest of us down. 


In Blown to Bits, they author talks about how it hasn't been proven yet that public-keys are uncrackable:


"No one has proved mathematically that the public-key encryption algorithms are unbreakable, in spite of determined efforts by top mathematicians and computer scientists to provide absolute proof of their security."


I think this quote is just plain silly. It's pretty difficult to prove anything. And even once, you have, its not certain. Disproving something gives you a definite answer. Example: All bicycles have wheels. So we find 10,000 bikes with wheels. Looks like we've proved it right? Wrong. It only take one bike without wheels to prove the opposite.