Secure your wireless router...or else!
14th May 2010.
People in Germany will all be searching the attic for their router instruction manuals today, as a court ruling has sided with the copyright industry and made their own citizens potential criminals for being ignorant about wireless routers settings. This is an area that only weeks ago Cisco was telling the world was one of the least understood and the reason for it bringing out a whole new range of routers.
A court in Karlsruhe found a defendant responsible for their internet connection being used for downloading music, even though it was blatantly not them who had done the downloading. The home-owner (who was on holiday at the time of the offence) was given a fairly small fine (£86) but the court's statement that "Private users are obligated to check whether their wireless connection is adequately secured to the danger of unauthorized third parties abusing it to commit copyright violation" is causing greater shockwaves.
This is a fairly crazy ruling, and this site would certainly like to see the judge in this case set-up a wireless router security connection himself, especially on an older router. Then perhaps it might have been a very different ruling.
The verdict has been variously described as 'eccentric' and 'wrong-headed', and it is very unlikely this would ever be considered in the UK. Phew! But for now, if you live in Germany and haven't worked out how to secure your wireless router, it seems you could be caught between the bad guys trying to get your data and the police arresting you for not knowing how to stop them.
