This morning while logged into my wireless router, doing some tweaking to the dd-wrt firmware, I saw an unknown device with the name “Titanic” hooked up to my connection. I got that sinking feeling that someone was either piggybacking my broadband connection or had hacked in and was at this moment downloading all my files! I quickly disabled wireless access to the router, renamed the SSID, switched off SSID broadcast, and changed the WPA password key to something stronger and more inconvenient. That’ll keep the beggars out, I thought. I then re-enabled wireless and reconnected my laptop.

My teenage daughter curious as to why so many expletives were emerging from my office, tentatively nudged the door open. “Everything okay Dad?” she asked. I explained the issue with the hacked router, the sinking feeling and the rogue device that had been scraping and leeching all my files for goodness knows how long…

“Oh, Titanic is what I named my iPod Touch,” she said casually. “When I connect it to iTunes it says ‘Titanic is syncing’, see? It’s a joke.”

Very funny. Haah-haah-haah. Sometimes I astound myself at how slow I am to catch a wave. The “Titanic is syncing” meme started back in October 2009 when kids (almost) everywhere were renaming their iPods “Titanic”, the eponymous movie having aired the US TV station TNT night of October 4. It was even picked up at the time by The Independent, for goodness sake.

Take home message: don’t be so neurotic about the DHCP list of wireless devices connected to your router even if all the lights are flashing madly throughout the night. Now, should I ignore that other entry in the list: “RoguePirateHackBotScamMonster”?

Related articles

• Titanic sinking to be tweeted in real-time (thenextweb.com)
• Steve Jobs pushing engineers for wireless Syncing (chatootsboots.wordpress.com)
• How to Secure Your Wireless Router (bargaineering.com)