Tell us, XFINITY, CableWiFi and HOME-7F0C-2.4, did it ever occur to you that your Wi-Fi names are really, really boring?
No offense, though! Generic is good! It’s so much better than “Quick, everybody out, NOW – before somebody connects to ‘remote detonator’!!!”
As the Michigan news site M Live reports, a patron of a Planet Fitness in Saginaw Township was looking through available Wi-Fi connections on Sunday evening when he noticed one named just that – “remote detonator.”
He brought it to the attention of the manager, who promptly evacuated the 24-hour gym and called police. According to Saginaw Township Police Chief Donald Pussehl, a bomb-sniffing dog made a sweep of the premises, but it didn’t turn up any explosives.
Nothing can be done to make the Wi-Fi naming wit change his or her alarming network name, Pussehl said: it’s speech that’s protected under the First Amendment. Pussehl:
Everything is perfectly legal from a police standpoint. There was no crime or threat. No call saying there was a bomb.
Fine, “remote detonator,” fine. We’ll see you your incendiary title, and we’ll raise you a virtual fortune cookie plea for help. Naked Security’s Paul Ducklin says he was once war-training through Sydney – that’s like war-biking, as in, measuring Wi-Fi security, but without the bike – when he came across a very not-boring Wi-Fi name:
I was travelling to Rooty Hill. I wanted to see how well Wi-Fi scanning worked at 100km/hr from inside a train carriage – very well, it turned out – and I came across the ESSID “Help I’m stuck in this router”, which made me laugh.
But perhaps I should have called the emergency services?
Maybe! But if we’re going into reactionary mode in response to Wi-Fi names, somebody really needs to call a urogynecologist for whoever owns that It Hurts When IP network that Steve Aoki came across.