Recently one of my daughters received a letter from Comcast stating the she illegally downloaded movies from the internet.  They were letting her know that they were releasing her name to the movie company because it was going to federal court. The Comcast account is in her name and they traced the IP address. She shares the house with several friends and didn’t have a password on the account.  Since she lives in a populated area, anyone living above or beside her could pick up her wireless.  With some investigation, we found her neighbor had downloaded 23  pornographic movies. Companies are paying lawyers to find copyright infringement cases and they are targeting college areas. Since most college students don’t want their names associated with a porn lawsuit the cases are being settled for a range of $750-$100,000. Quite the side business for the porn companies and the lawyers representing them! Take some steps now in protecting your wireless by putting a password on the wireless. Make one that is difficult for anyone to guess-use caps, numbers and symbols.  Also, know what your IP address is by using the link to the IP address locator. Your IP address will change with location.  Washington State has some good guidelines to help protect your computer and your wireless.

Photo thanks to Occam’s Taser blog

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2012 at 3:10 pm and is filed under General Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.