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Corporate Encouragement For Sharing Your WiFi
anagama writes "Conventional wisdom is that one should lockdown wifi, your ISP doesn't want you to share your connection, that person checking email outside the coffee shop ought to be arrested. The UK ISP BT is offering an alternative model. The company will encourage its three million broadband users to pick up a FON router and start sharing signals. 'For BT, the move makes its broadband offering more useful to customers, who can access the Internet from more places, and BT doesn't need to build out a new wireless network itself. BT's Gavin Patterson, a managing director, holds out hopes that the FON scheme can someday "cover every street in Britain." "We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity," he added in a statement. "If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny." '"
...but will BT pay for it?
The only way i see this working would be if organizations were compensated for sharing. Not just "encouraged". It'd be nice to put some of the excess on our fiber circuits to good use.
From the article, FON is charging the extra users. It's extra revenue for them. The extra users aren't getting on for free.
I can think of no simpler way to implement a city-wide free wifi system than a grassroots method such as this. Not only is the up front cost relatively inexpensive per user, it's distributed across thousands of people who can take part if/when they see fit, and it's much easier for individual people to maintain than a central authority.
Not only that, you would have the redundancy of having multiple choices of APs in a given area, so if one goes down for whatever reason, you can still choose another.
It's almost like the equivalent of swarm intelligence, but applied to wifi.
damned bleeding heart pirate and crime promoters, these telcos, how dare they muddy the waters of evidence-gathering against all those copyright-thieving artist-income-depriving file-sharing child-porn distributing criminals?
Some providers in the US also try/tried that, starting as early as 2003, and usually hoping that non-customers would pay $$ to access their network through such user-provided "open" wi-fi APs. I don't think this worked overly well so far though...
http://www.sonic.net/hotspots/
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/
FON authenticates its users.
Other "Foneros" can access the public channel for free, while non-Foneros can pay a few dollars a day to use the access points.
"If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT Openzone hotspots today, without paying a penny."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
RTFM. Slashdot doesn't delete posts because Taco doesn't believe in deleting posts. There are two ways I know of for a post to disappear:
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firstly, what the hell are you talking about? plausible deniability of what?
But what really annoys me about your comment is the shear stupidity of it. Is the UK a nazi-esque state? no. If it were would the media be able to report about when the police did make a bad call and kill an innocent man? would the independent police complaints commission investigate? would it be possible to criticise the government at all?...
So tell me how many death camps does the UK have? I can count... none.
Calling the UK a Nazi state is an insult to all the people who died because of the Nazi regime.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Must be screaming in pain now.. Even less of a way to determine who downloaded/uploaded something that is *isp sponsored*.
Cool.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wippies in Finland (http://www.wippies.com/) is doing a similar thing. They give a free WiFi box (among other things) to users who operate an access point and share their broadband connection with other Wippies members.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht
You share your bandwidth with someone else and the ISP pockets a little extra money if that someone doesn't happen to be a current customer? Yes, according to the article the other users will be on a different channel, so your service isn't interrupted, but no matter how you look at it you're still splitting your pipe. Also, since this scheme involves a new customer paying for access on your (already paid for) connection why not apply the extra money as a credit on your bill? I'm paying a pretty good chunk on my broadband (Time Warner), but I wouldn't mind this setup if it meant my bill was going to be lower.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
You are fucking joking, right?
Percentages, is it? OK. How many people wear backpacks in London? Millions. How many people run for a train? Millions. Of those, how many are suicide bombers? Four so far. So, shoot anyone wearing a backpack who is running for a train, on the off-chance they might be a bomber?
Moreover, despite the initial lies put about by the police, de Menezes was not carrying a bag of any kind. Nor was he wearing a heavy coat.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
Talk about the perfect excuse that it wasn't me sharing music over my WiFi router. It was someone else -- and BT make it all possible. Certainly an RIAA nightmare in the making.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you do sign up to the scheme then:
1) with the ever growing list of people getting done for illegal activity, ie downloading mp3s/illegal porn/'hacking' etc., will you be exempt from any charges relating to criminal activity through someone using your router?
2) is the broadband service provided truly unlimited?
I can't see many people in their right minds signing up to such a service if they weren't protected from neighbours doing heavy downloading and the drive-by wifi'ers downloading stuff deemed illegal. Because on one end of the scale I wouldn't want additional charges for bandwidth use or have the speed restricted due to too someone else using it too much, and the other end I wouldn't want to be arrested because someone else used my internet connection through the wifi router for criminal activities.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Nor was he running - that, too, was a lie.
Amnesty International
They only get to use the additional 512kb that is given to those who subscribe to the scheme. That 512kb can only be used by other users, not the subscriber himself. His connection remains at the maximum speed that he is entitled to under his existing contract. But it explains this in TFA....
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
I got that FON adaptor with a Skype phone, and it took me all of 30 seconds to decide not to install it.
:-).
Given the current security climate I'm really not going to give someone a chance to (a) identify where I live and if I'm around (look at their status info on the web - having an access point means you've got kit to steal) and (b) to put a remote controlled listening device on my traffic. The FON adaptor is a small Linux box, and I don't know what it does. Worse, someone else controls it and can flash the thing at any time.
Nope. Not interested in contributing to an 802.11 version of Echelon
Insert
That's why we invented ssl, ssh, etc. AP security is mostly an illusion anyway and at least IMO it should not be allowed as it's hijacking a scarce public resource (the frequency being used) and making it into a private resource. Very annoying if you live in a crowded area where everyone is trying to run their own little AP and it's to congested to work well and you can't share because they are all locked.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Why do we need a teloco to allow us to do this? DIY is always better.
Money is the root of all evil?
yes. ISPs would be much more secure if they didn't make internet access available to customers. And banks would be much more secure if they weren't always dealing with people's money.
Sharing anything causes an increased security risk. The more hops data makes, the more vulnerable it is. The most vulnerable place typically being where it first enters a network.
The question then becomes can BT manage these new security risks well enough to keep customer satisfaction at profitable levels? I'm sure they have some pretty smart people behind figuring that out, and I hope that they are right.
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