think of it this way... open wireless access is akin to letting random people borrow your car.

you don't know what they're going to use it for. they could be robbing a bank, carting dead hookers to the field, drug deals, going through your stuff, whatever... you're basically trusting that the people that use the car are going to do so for good purposes. picking up their kids from school, grocery shopping, running a quick errand, etc.
wifi is kind of the same in the fact that people could be using it to steal movies/music, access nefarious pictures/information, e-stalking, hacking into email/banking accounts, or they could be using it for banking, amazon, videosift, wikipedia... who knows. sure there's logs, but if you know how to access the logs, then you know how to protect yourself and probably aren't concerned with this anyway.

the point is you never know who could be doing what on your open, unprotected access point. if you're willing to fend off the MPAA/RIAA, CEOP, or even perhaps the local police/FBI then by all means, leave your access point wide open. WARdrivers will document your WAP and pirates/hackers/child-exploiters will love you for it.

read the instruction booklet that came with your router. 99% of the time the very first set of instructions after setting the thing up is how to change your admin password and enable encryption. Those instructions are there for a good reason.

lol so true.
I had this same experience on the phone for 4 hours with a call centre in India trying to fix my wireless router.

"Dude, I know you're only level 1 phone support, and you're not really technical, you just read what the screen says. And i know you have to follow the script before you can refer me to level 2 support...
...But do you really think restarting everything for the 4th time will be any different that the other 3 times?"

So THATS where babies come from

(took a wild swing at a pun, dont know anything about 'dem routers and what not)

Fascinating. Especially since I have a gigabit wireless N router that is 20,000 times faster than this the size of a paperback book sitting in my living room.

Your video, The very first router on the Internet, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

"Big ass router killed the bulletin board" isn't as catchy as "Video killed the radio star", but it is the same story.

Inside a house the transformers sound like shotguns, outside the house they sound like cannons.

I think standard practice in certain areas, meaning what Ive seen, most transformers are either on the ground, or underground.

I'm also pretty sure that's where the phone lines go, as well as the subnetwork for your particular networks.

That is why you should never connect directly to your modem, because then you are accessing the subnetwork with out the benefit of a Gateway. Always connect through a switched router, for an extra hop that is designed to cause trouble for hecklers.

But you never heard that from me.

I realize this. I'm am IT professional. Regardless of software, firewall, and or router rules. If the kiddies go to the Kids channel they are in for a big surprise, as it's full of videos not suitable for young children or subject matter directed towards adults that they couldn't possibly comprehend. Perhaps when you get your ruby you can make a bid to take over the channel. It seems the owner isn't active on the site any longer anyway from what I can tell.

In reply to this comment by BoneyD:
Erm no, I'm not kidding. Parents can use filtering software, router url blocks or a myriad of other tools to ensure they only go to the kids.videosift.com page. It's not outside the bounds of reason that kids might be looking there, why would people even post children's videos in the first place?

Btw, please don't talk down at me like that yeah? I may not have as high a star count, but I've been around here a while.

In reply to this comment by Duckman33:
You're kidding right? Do you really think kids that young view VideoSift and are watching Bill Maher clips? And if they are, are you telling me they go straight to the Kids channel and don't look at anything on the main page where in plain full view are sifts with sexual subject matter, boobs, more boobs AND foul language, etc. blaring in their little faces? Seriously? Please. Not trying to be a jerk. But let's use some common sense here.

In reply to this comment by BoneyD:
The subject of appropriate content for the channel has been brought up before:
http://kids.videosift.com/talk/Kids-Sift-about-kids-or-for-kids
http://kids.videosift.com/talk/Kids-Channel-Dilemma

Just because a channel's strayed from it's intentions, doesn't mean it shouldn't be policed, does it? This video included metaphorical language about child rape and other such nastiness. Children don't understand sarcasm like that though.

I should have come to you first before going ahead and changing things, my apologies for that. But I just really think that Kids should stay as their 'sandbox'.

In reply to this comment by Duckman33:
I reviewed videos in the Kids channel before assigning that channel to my sift. It contains videos both for kids, and that have kids as the subject matter. Therefore, I'll be re-assigning the kids channel to my video. That said, please be aware of the subject matter of the channels before you re-assign my sifts, as I take great effort in verifying that they belong in said channels prior to assigning them.

In reply to this comment by BoneyD:
Don't think this is really suitable for the kiddies channel.
*nochannel

*Military
*Latenight
*1sttube
*Politics
*Comedy
*Drugs

Ah man... I've always wondered why my router shuts down when I throw pennies at it...

>> ^curiousity:

You argue possibilities while I argue historical facts.

More accurately, I was talking about the nature of government, while you're arguing about what government did. As if that matters, and as if I didn't know. I think that's the root of our disagreement.

Point 1: The technology used

So, progress would have been much slower, but somehow they would never end up creating the first backbone, because an endeavor of that magnitude is just unfeasible, really. No private investor/company can think that far ahead, advancements in technology wouldn't provide any kind of cost reductions that would, eventually, allow a backbone to be established.

Point 2: The infrastructure needed for the internet

Tell me, what essential part of the internet's infrastructure requires legislation to work? You know those lazy routers must be coerced at the point of a gun, right? How about the police that we need to control all that network traffic?

Is it possible? Sure, anything's possible, but is it likely? I don't think so. The government provided the funding and direction. Look at technology today. Do you know how many advances actually came from military research?

I completely agree that technologies that are related to the use of force are only possible because of military research.

The nuclear bomb for instance. Seriously, I have a lot of trouble imagining how the private sector could come up with that. A government would hardly ever allow a corporation to own such destructive technology.

Now, about the internet. It was initially funded by military research for a specific purpose, related to intelligence, not use of force.

Today it serves many other unrelated purposes. So, by its very nature, there's nothing about the internet that would make it impossible for the private sector to develop it on its own.

It obvious that we can't have a rational discussion about this.

Maybe I unintentionally made it too hard for you to agree with me by being so confrontational, so I'll just have to enjoy watching you paint yourself into a corner.

This doesn't help with the initial question, but I'm a big fan of m0n0wall (http://m0n0.ch), been using it for years. Doesn't have any sort of scheduling mechanism as far as I know, though you might be able to fudge one with the captive portal feature. Maybe its big brother, pfSense, can do it.

But really these are the types of things you find in home routers and m0n0/pfS are meant for SMB. Seems like it ought to be trivial to find a new router that does everything you need. Here, browse a few of these: http://www.consumersearch.com/wireless-routers

I really need to buy a new router. I always wanted to do QoS for my MMOs and torrents.

http://www.dd-wrt.com

It's an open source wireless router firmware that you can flash on several different models of wireless router.

The flash itself is geeky, but they give detailed instructions on how to do it. Once installed it's got a better UI than most wireless routers do by default, and a boatload more options.

In this case, you're looking for QoS, so that you can throttle bandwidth effectively so that Torrent-porn guy doesn't stop Youtube-Videosift guy or WoW junkie from being able to get their jollies too.

It just takes a little common sense prioritization, make low-bandwidth latency sensitive stuff have the highest priority (e.g. Warcraft), make medium-bandwidth medium-latency stuff like streaming video or http in general the next rung down, and then high-bandwith latency insensitive stuff like torrent/emule/gnutella the lowest possible priority.

You can also block certain types of traffic, but it sounds like you're looking for bandwidth shaping, not a net nanny type setup.

Torrent can be the bane of everyone's existence if it's not properly throttled. If the above is too complex, just do a bandwidth test (when no one else is using the line), and then tell the torrent head to set his max upstream rate to half what the line can do, and you should be fine. It's not a bad idea to throttle downstream too, but filling the upstream pipe is usually the real culprit for torrent-related slowdowns.

My suggestion is to build an OpenBSD-based router network router running pf.

PF is what the United Arab Emirates use to block Skype use in the UAE (to force everyone to use the state-owned telco provider). It's extremely powerful, and while it may seem like overkill, I'm thinking that it would probably be the easiest way to get what you want.

OpenBSD is a open source, free-for-download BSD UNIX, originally branched from the FreeBSD code when one of the developers got an itch to audit the entire codebase for potential security flaws and exploitations. It's been called the most secure OS in the world. Every line of code has been audited for security flaws. PF was added to the kernel a couple years ago.

The PF firewall is extremely configurable.

But all this requires some requisite UNIX-hacking skills.

http://www.openBSD.org
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pf&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

^Serious geekery virtually rules me out though I do have several routers to experiment upon if I have the time this summer. Bit disappointed that it would require that much work, you'd think the firmware on popular routers would be slightly better.

Ta for the replies!