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UK Bill Would Outlaw Open Wi-Fi
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from ZDNet about another troubling aspect of the UK's much-maligned Digital Economy Bill:
"The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week. This would leave many organizations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the Internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access. 'This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in. Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small cafe,' said Lilian Edwards, professor of Internet law at Sheffield University."
Relatedly, an anonymous reader passes along a post which breaks down the question of whether using unprotected Wi-Fi is stealing.
ISPs hate these proposals even more than we do, since the Government wants them to keep records of Internet traffic for all of their subscribers - that means increased costs to the ISP, which will eventually be passed on to subscribers, meaning fewer subscribers, and possibly even fewer ISPs in the long run as the smaller ones struggle to stay profitable.
As for "protected" WiFi, the protection appears to be mainly against copyright owners having to do any work to prove that someone somewhere has illegally downloaded and/or distributed some of their work.
-MT.
-MT.
I'm sure if you paid Peter Mandelson* some brown envelope money then he would amend the law. But as it is, I think he's more interested in the kind of money that media moguls have when he goes mixing with them on yachts in the South of France for a "friendly chat." The man and the current UK government are evil. * the chief architect of this whole bastard Digital Economy law
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What's really needed is a multi-national organization to address what's clearly an all-out assault on internet freedom by a variety of vested interests. Governments, patent trolls, multi-national entertainment corporations...all of them are pushing in the same direction, and there doesn't seem to be any unified push back.
Let's be clear: I'm not alleging a conspiracy. What I'm saying is that these groups all know where their best interests lie (screwing the consumer/citizen/user/whatever) and they sense that if they don't get their boot on our throat, no matter how badly they have to bend the various constitutions of the democracies they use for cover, the opportunity will slip away. They aren't about to let that happen if they can possibly help it.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Would you allow us to have open streets, sir, or should we wear tags to identify us while we walk outside?
* Shut down the last hiding-place. Anonymity be gone.
* Make encryption illegal. No Secrets.
* Make people sign every ip-packet with their government-issued key and make ISPs drop all unsigned packets. Total accountability.
=> Everyone secure beneath watchfull eyes (especially our children)
creepy!
>>>people shouldn't have truly open access points to begin with.
Why not? If I want to open my kitchen and give away free food, I can. If I want to buy a bunch of blank CDs and hand-out copies of Ubuntu Linux, I can. Why can't I give-away free access to Wi-Fi in my home or restaurant?
No reason I can think of, except to limit free speech/protest and give the government even more control over public policy (i.e. push their one true agenda).
Alex Jones the Nutter was just discussing this on his radio show: http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=175591 - about how Microsoft, corporations, and government are colluding to silence the people and control what we hear or read.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As a network administrator for a small local ISP I have to say I would absolutely loathe this proposal. I can't even begin to imagine the infrastructure and management nightmare to do something like this at all of our locations.
So OK, you use encryption for your APs, which you then have to give the password out to your customers making the wireless in effect public anyway.
Or do you propose we only use WPA2-EAP? So what, we have to not only manage each account individually, but I assume we have to do personnel verification? We simply could have some sort of web based account creation, but would we be held liable if they forged/stole the information? Do we have to do some sort of credit card authorization to make sure the person is who they say they are or do we have to see their ID personally? This kind of defeats the purpose of wireless in some locales.
And I assume they will want us to log all of the traffic otherwise we'd have to route our public IPs. While in and of itself is not that difficult, most of the time this would be increasingly difficult. Have you priced peering lately? It's not cheap and we're running out of IPs, running NAT at these places is sometimes the only way to bring wireless there. If we can run NAT but have to log the traffic the kind of hardware necessary in order to retain logs for any length of time and keeping it low latency is pretty astronomical and economically infeasible.
So here's a list of services that they will have to run in order to comply with this: Account management/key storage(ldap), Authentication(RADIUS), Account Creation(web whatever), Packet Logging(ntop) OR Peering Connection/Routable IPs, some sort of database for log retention, and an AP capable of handling the processing power for WPA2-EAP/Authentication. Oh plus you'll need someone to implement and administrate it.
Does the government plan on paying for this? While the company I work for has the ability to do this and we do for some locations, doing it everywhere would be a nightmare. Not to mention how ripe for abuse this whole system would be. There's a reason why it's not already done. It's expensive, time consuming, hurts the service, and it's easy to get around.
This is a dumb idea and it won't work. It will put smaller ISPs out of business and even the big ones will have trouble with it. And what do we do about Mom and Pop that don't know how to secure their own wireless? Do they now become liable if someone uses their connection?
The hell happened to common carrier status?
I pirate stuff myself. I just don't try to fool myself that it's morally inert. I guess you *could* argue that I wouldn't watch movies if they weren't free (which is probably true in the vast majority of cases).
In any case, we're talking about WiFi. If you use your neighbor's wifi, you deprive him the use of the quota that you used, however little it may be. You're also using a certain percentage of his quota, which you did not pay for.
Don't try to fool yourself with flimsy technicalities in a childish attempt to screw with your moral compass. No amount of post-hoc justification can make a wrong right, it'll just fuck up your moral compass.
I hate printers.