Blogging from the MuniWireless.com Conference. AKA How the Technically Savvy Aren't Security Conscious

I've spent the last couple days at the MuniWireless.com conference. A group of us got around to critiquing the technologies and practices of the crème de la crème in this market. As is often the case, the focus was on encryption and security (or the entire lack there-of) in most people's everyday practices. As an example, one conference participant decided to run Ethereal and see what was being sent in plain text over the network.

As someone who has often been mocked for running my e-mail through an ssh tunnel and using OTR on my instant messager client. But after seeing the results from just 28 minutes of Ethereal, it was downright scary...

Logins and passwords, various chats, names, private info, jokes about threatening the families of vendors clients if they didn't buy their product. You name it, it was there -- thousands and thousands of pieces of private information.

At a time when everyone is talking about security this and security that, so few of the conference participants were actually being secure in their (often very) private Internet use.