Come on, I’m old, and even I know you don’t need wi-fi to post photos. Unless she has the world’s worst cell phone data plan.
For that matter, how does she not already know her boyfriend’s wi-fi password?
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Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s late in the month… she may be out until the 1st. Or at least, by highly throttled.
Doesn’t sweat usually accumulate on the INSIDE of the jacket? Seems to me there’s something seriously wrong with either Jeremy or his jacket.
And yeah, Sara and Jeremy’s other friends would have had the wi-fi password in their phones years ago.
I’m with BA. I would like some more discussion on the sweat outside of his jacket. That’s the IDU part of this C. Seems to me it’s a pretty bull$h1t scenario contrived to make this ‘joke’ work, even for cartoon physics.
Ditto on what Stan & B.A, said. A simpler (but definitely über-geezerish) setup would have been to immobilize Jeremy by having him lick the pump handle.
She probably has plans for every byte of high-speed data on her phone plan.
If she’s been to Jeremy’s house at least once before, her phone should be set to automatically connect.
Jeremy’s a teenage boy. Does he believe in wearing actual winter gear, or is he just in a hoodie, or something else that the sweat could easily soak through?
But yeah, no way would she not have the WiFi password. Especially if she’s careful with her data like that.
“But yeah, no way would she not have the WiFi password”
I can think of a couple of ways. One really obvious way would be if there is no wifi password to have.
None of my daughter’s friends had the household wifi password.
@James
1) If there’s no password then the question’s moot, no?
2) Just curious, if yoyr daughter’s friends spent significant time at your house, why didn’t they gave the wi-fi password? It’s not the sort of thing anybody has a great reason to keep secret. These days, I imagine a teenage asking for the password is about common as asking to use the bathroom.
Relevant comic:
What you need is a secondary, “guest” network. And give out that password relatively freely. While maintaining some control over the one you yourself use for connecting to work, for banking, hell for shopping.
“1) If there’s no password then the question’s moot, no?”
OK. And?
“if your daughter’s friends spent significant time at your house, why didn’t they gave the wi-fi password? It’s not the sort of thing anybody has a great reason to keep secret.”
People who connect to your wifi network are inside your security perimeter. They can connect to the other devices on your network without going through a firewall. “No big deal” you say. “They’re just kids”. Yeah… kids with malware-infested devices. So, they don’t connect to the secured network.
My setup was fairly complex. Most of my computer equipment was wired by Ethernet. I had a secured wireless network, for devices in other parts of the house where I didn’t want to run cable. I also had an unsecured AP, which was severely throttled. When I did upgrades and repairs at home for people whose devices I didn’t control, I had those devices connect to the unsecured network to install patches and tools. I also had a lot of monitoring tools watching that connection, so I could pick up on malware phoning home and deal with it.
Can somebody using a cellphone affect anything else connected on a system? Serious question.
“1) If there’s no password then the question’s moot, no?”
OK. And?
By which I meant if there’s no password, she wouldn’t be asking for one in the first place and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
@ CIDU Bill – A mobile phone can siphon a portion of the host system’s bandwidth, but in most cases, the phone’s WiFi traffic wouldn’t be able to swamp a landline (wire) connection. I’d be more concerned about data privacy issues, if the phone’s own network connections were not properly secured.
That’s what I mean, Kilby: CAN a phone connected to the system do any harm to it?
I don’t follow the privacy issue either: I can’t use my phone to access any other computer in our network, and I certainly didn’t do anything to keep the computers secure.
If the phone’s been compromised it can do arbitrarily bad things by sending out janky packets, same as any other network device. It would be fairly difficult to use a phone as a tool for hacking into things deliberately, but that’s a different proposition.
… let me amend that since it’s unclear: it can do whatever can be done by sending out arbitrary network packets. Theoretically this is “nothing much” and If your local network is misconfigured so as to be vulnerable, it’s your fault. However, in practice it’s possible for a compromised phone to be carrying late-model malware that includes novel attacks, so there’s still some element of risk. How much risk it is… is not easy to characterize.
“if there’s no password, she wouldn’t be asking for one in the first place”
If she’s clairvoyant enough to know there’s no password, she’s also clairvoyant enough to know what the password is if there is one.
“Can somebody using a cellphone affect anything else connected on a system? Serious question.”
A network doesn’t know (doesn’t HAVE to know) what kind of devices are connected to it. So the question is really, “can a cellphone run code that attacks other kinds of devices” and the answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Can it do so even if the owner is unaware that it is doing so? Still “yes”.
(Keep in mind, I built the system the way I did because I fixed computers that had malware infestations, charging a suitable rate for data recovery to convince people to keep proper backups. Nothing to do with phones.)
” I can’t use my phone to access any other computer in our network”
Respectfully, the fact that you don’t know how doesn’t imply that nobody does.
Maybe THIS is what happened to Jeremy . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2019/02/24