Why you should disable “sharing” on your laptop

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Why you should disable “sharing” on your laptop

I’m sitting at the Las Vegas airport, hoping to get an earlier flight home on standby. They’ve got free and reasonably fast open wifi here, which is helpful.

But apparently some folks here aren’t too conscious about wifi security — they’ve left their laptops open to “sharing” (access by other computers on the network. I’m not kidding. Here’s what I’m seeing in my finder currently:

sharing left on

Not good, folks. Remember to check your system preferences and disable sharing before getting on any network (especially public wifi) where you’re not sure who’s there.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on April 27, 2008 at 2:12 pm and filed under tips, travel. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

That’s a pretty cool screenshot. I think by default, on the Mac, sharing is only open as a drop-box. Someone can drop off a file in a special directory but that’s it. They can’t format your hard drive or anything like that,

[Reply]

1. Brett Borders on April 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Thank you for sharing!

I actually think some people are oblivious to this situation. I realized my own fault in not knowing this until I first moved to New York in 2001. My apartment has public wifi to a certain extent.

Some of the residents STEAL the wifi connection from our management office and I see some crazy listings for file sharing. However, I learned to set up a secure wifi connection and to disable file sharing too when I leave my home.

Thank you for repeating this valuable lesson!!

[Reply]

2. Jennifer on April 27th, 2008 at 2:26 pm