California wants WiFi warning stickers

California is getting serious about network security—well, serious enough to legislate stickers. AB 2415 has cleared the General Assembly and now heads to Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk for his signature. It’s an attempt by the state to make sure that consumers know how to activate security features on their WiFi routers in order to prevent personal information from being accessed “by unauthorized users who piggyback onto their network connection.”

The bill requires that all WiFi routers manufactured after October 1, 2007 and sold in the state of California come with a prominent warning about the dangers of unsecured routers and include instructions for password protecting the devices. While most manufacturers include this information in the product manual, this will no longer be enough. Instead, the state wants the warnings to be impossible to miss, and that’s where the stickers come in.

Vendors are given two basic choices: 1) they can include a security warning in the software setup routine or they can 2) attach a “temporary warning sticker” to the device that must be peeled off before the router can function. These warnings do not need to contain the complete information—one can only imagine the size of the sticker that would be required—but they must spell out the danger and direct users to an appropriate resource such as the product manual or a Web site.

The bill does contain an exemption for enterprise sales. It only affects small offices (with less than 50 workers), home offices, or residential settings, so harried IT managers won’t have to worry about peeling fifty blaze orange stickers from the power buttons of their new router shipment.

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