Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. Can you be arrested for downloading child porn even if you never do? And the fact is that you can. There have been several recent arrests that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who has installed a wireless router, also known as a WiFi router. These little boxes allow your laptop, your iPad, and other wireless devices to connect
to the internet. Tens of millions of people in the United States have installed wireless routers because they make it so easy to connect to the Internet. It turns out that if you install a wireless router, and if you leave it in its default settings and you turn it on, you've opened yourself up to a major vulnerability. Your new wireless router creates a wide open WiFi hot spot with
a diameter of several hundred feet. Because you have used the default settings, which means that you have set no password to prevent people from connecting, anyone nearby can now connect into your hot spot. It could be a neighbor, the guest of a neighbor, or someone parked on a nearby street. Because you have no password on your router, anyone nearby can connect to your router in just a
few seconds. When they connect, you will not know that it's happening unless you were to get in and look at the routers log files and its tools and so on. And you may not ever care. If they read a few web pages or check their email with your connection, that tiny bit of bandwidth they use would be imperceptible. But if they start watching a streaming video off of YouTube or Netflix, you may notice that your connection has gotten really sluggish, and you may have no idea why.
The bigger problem, however, is child porn. If the person connected to your hot spot downloads child pern bography, or any other illegal material, federal agents are going to trace the illegal activity to your wireless router, and then they're gonna come after you. Once they find you, the attitude will be to arrest now and ask questions later. Meanwhile, the person who did the downloading is invisible. It may take days or weeks for your innocence to be confirmed.
And the amazing thing is that you will have no idea that it's happening at the time it's happening. So what can you do to prevent this scenario from unfolding. There are actually three different things you can do, all of which require a little bit of fiddling with your router. If you are not technology minded, this fiddling may be uncomfortable and you may want to enlist the help of a friend who is technology minded or hire someone to configure things. The basic idea is that your WiFi router
has a way to manipulate its settings. You need to log into the router and at the very least set up a WiFi password. How do you log into the router? The owner's manual for the router will contain instructions on how to do this. If you can't find the manual that came with your router, you can find it on the internet by typing the model number into a search engine. Some routers even come with a CD that will help
you through these steps. So what you do is you log into your router, find the wireless settings page, and create something called a w P A password for your router, not a web password. A w P A password is the kind of password you would like to create. This is one of those things that takes thirty seconds. If you know what you're doing. As soon as you set that password, you've eliminated the threat of accidental arrests for child porn. Of course, you've also just disconnected all your
own devices as well. They can't connect in now that you've set a password, So now you need to go to your laptop, your iPad, and all your other devices and type in the password there as well. They will then be able to reconnect to your password protected wireless rout uter, and chances are you will never have to think about it again. If you want to be even more secure, there are two other things you can do. The first thing is to turn off something called S
s i D broadcasting. This is a feature that makes your network visible to anyone who's nearby. Once you turn off S s i D broadcasting, you can connect because you know the S s i D that's one of the things you set in your router settings, but other people will not see your network. The other thing you can do is turn on Mac address screening. You can enter the MAC address of each device you want to
connect into your network. Anyone with an unknown Mac address will be denied access, even if they guess the password while you're in there. Making these changes. Make sure your router does not create and enable a separate guest network. Some routers do this as a courtesy or as an extra feature. If your router does create a second guest network, disable it or set a password on this second high
spot as well. By enabling all three of these features and making sure you don't have a guest network, you make it virtually impossible for anyone outside of your household to connect to your network. And now you've made it impossible for strangers to download child porn through your network and for someone from the federal government to break down
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