Finland To Legalize Use of Unsecured Wi-Fi

Apotekaren writes "The Finnish Ministry of Justice has started preparing changes to a current law that criminalizes using unsecured wireless hot spots (Google translation; Finnish original). The reasoning includes the impossibility of tracking unlawful use, the ease of securing networks, and the lack of real damage done by this activity. It is also hard for a user to know if an unsecured network is intended for public use or not. The increased ubiquity of legal, open networks in parks, airports, and other public places has also influenced this move by the Ministry of Justice."

Comments

There's got to be a better way...

[LostCluster]

We need a standard for secure WiFi that allows guests in, most likely by giving them a personal shared key on their receipt or ticket. The big problem with unsecured WiFi is that there's no accountability. Some video-downloading hog can take all the bandwidth, and trying to use anything on 2.4 GHz during a Apple or Google developer conference presentation is near impossible. WiFi was a good first take, but we've got to work QoS and authentication in just like we have for wired just for safety's sake. Otherwise, these laws banning open WiFi actually make sense.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[fotbr]

Sounds like you don't need laws, you need more bandwidth.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I'd argue that you really don't need to reinvent the wheel. I like the idea of guest accounts. Simply throttle their bandwidth to something appropriate for the activity. If you're running a hotspot and are graciously allowing your neighbors access then 10 connections with 20 kbps each seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[fbjon]

I do exactly this with Tomato WRT. QoS throttling for all unknown devices down to around ISDN speeds. It can be circumvented of course, but I don't really see that happening.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[fluch]

If the owner leaves the WiFi access point unsecured and the DHCP server gives to my the network config info needed, then I consider this as the owners permission to use his network: my computer asked if it can join the network, the DHCP server (configured by the owner) said yes, here are the details.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[amazeofdeath]

There's no ban on *having* an unsecured WiFi access point in Finland. The bad wording in TFS muddles it a bit, but the point is that *unauthorized* use of an open WiFi access point is illegal currently. The new law is supposed to allow any use of open WiFi networks, as it can easily happen accidentally, the user often doesn't know whether there's a permission to use the network, and encrypting the network is pretty damn easy.

Re:There's got to be a better way...

[flink]

If your neighbors "doohicky" continuously flung teleporters that would transport the user into their house all over the neighborhood then it would be a more apt analogy. The point is that RF is not a door and a WI-FI router is not a house, it's its own thing and needs its own set of rules.

Gateways

[suso]

Finland To Legalize Use of Unsecured Wi-Fi

Kids, don't you know that unsecured wifi is just a gateway. Pretty soon you'll be cracking into stuff with stronger encryption. Then where will be? Sitting on the side of the road in some bad neighborhood looking asking to borrow a power jack.

Re:Gateways

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

Kids, don't you know that unsecured wifi is just a gateway. Pretty soon you'll be cracking into stuff with stronger encryption. Then where will be? Sitting on the side of the road in some bad neighborhood looking asking to borrow a power jack.

That's bullshit. I didn't even try unsecured wifi until I had spent countless hours on stolen AOL passwords. If anything it's the illegal nature of wifi that draws people into harder stuff. By forcing them to hangout in seedy locales, like underground poetry bars, they are exposed to things like hipsters and thick-rimmed, non-prescription glasses; things that they would have never even heard of otherwise!

Re:Gateways

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

Those trial CDs had your name all over them. I looked up to you, what was I supposed to think? Then the way you just left them lying around... what did you think was going to happen?

I learned it from watching you, dad. I learned it from watching you!

*sobbing ensues*

Name Change

[just_another_sean]

I hear by propose that Finland change the name of the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Common Sense and Applied Intelligence!

Imagine that, a reasonable and informed change to a law to sync with their ever changing technological landscape. I am astounded! One
only hopes others will learn from this event.

Re:Name Change

[DMNT]

The finnish legislation standard used to be (until 2000's where they passed some questionable laws) to lay down technologically neutral laws, where the technology used played no important role but the action did. This proposed legislation is just an exception to be amended to the current law, which regulates the use of other people's property, which you currently are not allowed to use without a prior permission. Currently some of the facilities offer free WiFi without informing you of such and this behaviour would be illegal by the law even when it's not easy to detect or to prosecute. So they are for the sake of clarity, going to make an exception because it is often hard to find out whether you're allowed to use the open network or not.

The human translation for newstext:

Joining a wireless accesspoint to be legalized

The ministry of justice is forming a law to allow use of unprotected WiFi access points. By the current law the unauthorized use of open networks has been illegal.

The exception is rationalized by for example, the lack of harm done, impossibility of oversight and the relative easiness of protecting the network. For the end user it is also often difficult to find out when the network is meant for public use and when it is not.

The statements received by the ministry of justice (which includes EFFI, Electronic Frontier Finland, by transl.) remind that the avilability of free WiFi access has increased in public space such as parks and air fields and they don't always inform the end user of the free availability.

According to the ministry of justice, there has been only one sentence for the use of unsecured WiFi by the district court. Higher court upheld the decision and it never went to the supreme court.

Most of the statements were for the legalization. However, many of them held it in high value that the owner of the access point should be held innocent in case of the illegal use of the access point.

Experts' opinion is that a lot of the WiFi access points are unsecured and the unauthorized use of them is common. Securing of the access point is usually easy when following the manuals of the access point.

The unauthorized use of the access point might slow the network down but it is hard to note unless there's a lot of file transfers compared to the bandwidth available.

Barnes and Nobel

[orsty3001]

Just do what Barnes and Nobel does. If you try to connect to their system it will want to text you a temporary access code.

Scandinavian countries seem wise

[TruthSauce]

There are a lot of common sense ideas in the Scandinavian countries.

I've been thinking about it and I think that perhaps it's related to their increased tolerance for failure. A Swede or Norwegian or Finn is able to say "yes, this was a mistake" and not be derided in public for it.

The concept that humans aren't perfect isn't lost on these people as it seems to be in much of the rest of the world.

Another great example of this is the sex offender registries in the area. They're not only non-existent, they're actually illegal. They contend that it is a gross violation of personal privacy for those who already served their time and point out (probably correctly) that they do very little than encourage fear and paranoia amongst the populace. There was even a very public protest in OPPOSITION to a group who set up a private registry with similar information, after which, the site was removed due to its illegal content (in violation of local privacy laws).

To bring up another example, in these countries, there are very few frivolous lawsuits, as the system is carefully balanced to make it burdensome to bring one.

It is much easier for a judge to deem the plaintiff liable for all court costs and all defense costs if he feels the lawsuit was brought with malice or with little hope of succeeding.

Additionally, the state represents both parties in some cases, removing the financial burden of defending yourself from lawsuits. What they then do is place that burden on one of the parties in the case that they have been shown to be "willfully" out of compliance with civil law, but in cases where it is a genuine misunderstanding, the costs are absorbed by the system.

Rather than having a heirarchy where the rich can do whatever they want and the poor get fucked. Or a system where the powerful control everything and those down on their luck are brazenly left out to dry, these countries seem to have found a balance.

Also, worth noting, that these countries, despite their low populations and high standard of living, are not in the list of struggling economies, even during this "European crisis".

Absolutely brilliant. :-)

Re:Scandinavian countries seem wise

[dropadrop]

Also, worth noting, that these countries, despite their low populations and high standard of living, are not in the list of struggling economies, even during this "European crisis".

Absolutely brilliant. :-)

To be fair, Finland and Sweden have not been doing especially well during this crisis. Both countries are highly dependent on exports that have been doing badly. Finland had a huge drop in both exports and gdp (In Finland GDP was -7.8% last year, a drop of 9% since the previous year) during 2009, and the government took a huge loan just to keep things running. The good part is, that we don't have as much debt as more southern countries, so on the big picture things still look ok.