466: Moving
| Moving |
 Title text: We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'. |
Explanation
The caption notes that few forces are more powerful than a geek trying to get Internet in a new apartment, thus explaining the title of the comic: Moving. One of the consequences of moving one's place of residence is having to arrange connection to various essential utilities, including the internet. One way to reduce the time where such utilities are unavailable is to steal them off your neighbours. As geeks prioritise access to Minecraft over common human values, they are more likely to access other's internet via such underhanded means.
A cantenna is a do-it-yourself antenna made from a can, in this case a pringles can. Cueball is pointing his cantenna to the neighbors across the road, which, as he says, will allow him to connect to the wifi network there.
Megan asks if the neighbors themselves have internet access, to which Cueball answers that they don't, but he thinks that they will get hooked up to the internet first. Potentially this is because they are more likely to pay for their internet access rather than hacking someone else's.
The title text continues this theme of connecting to other people's networks, noting that we should have a holiday in honour of those people who don't bother reconfiguring their Linksys routers (thus leaving them with the default name of 'linksys'; this was very common when this comic was published in 2008), which allows other people to connect to those networks very easily, as they aren't encrypted by default and don't need a password.
Transcript
- [Caption above the panel:]
- There are few forces more powerful than geeks desperately trying to get internet in a new apartment.
- [Cueball is pointing an empty can out the open window. It is placed on a moving box, and lots of small parts are lying on the floor in the otherwise empty room. Megan stands behind him with a laptop in one hand.]
- Cueball: Okay, the pringles cantenna has let us patch into the WiFi network across the road.
- Megan: And they have internet?
- Cueball: No, but I think the cable van will hook up their house first.
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A problem greatly lessened since this comic by the proliferation of phones which also act as hotspots. 108.162.221.64 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
You know, Megan never says that the neighbors don't have internet. Just saying. SilverMagpie (talk) 23:37, 6 January 2017 (UTC)
- ...What was I SAYING??? (SilverMagpie here; login seems to be broken) 162.158.106.126 02:43, 26 September 2018 (UTC)
- ...I think what you were getting at, SilverMagpie, was an error in the page back in 2017. Look at the history and you'll see the page was written so that Megan said the neighbors didn't have internet, but she never did say that, and you're pointing out the error. Someone else came along and fixed it later.
