A commentary on Wired.com suggests that an open home wireless network isn't such a bad and dangerous thing people percieve it to be. His thinking is that the danger is actually quite small. Sure someone might hack you by sitting in a car by the street or they can just sit in a nice comfy Starbucks and do the same for many more users. Also, worried that someone might use that open network to download copyright content illegally and sue you? Well, as he put it, the odds are about the same as getting hit by an asteroid but it actually provides a defense as it will be difficult to prove that you did the download versus a leacher.
My advice in general is if you live in a home with a decent size yard, an open network is no biggie as a person would have to literally camp out in your yard to use it. If you live in an apartment or have a postage size stamp yard, going ahead and use a little security. If you don't want to fool with WEP, WPA, and other key based systems, a the very least enable MAC filtering.
The complete article is here.
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