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'Wi-Fi Police' Stalk Olympic Games
schwit1 writes with news from London that Olympic venues are being patrolled by so-called "Wi-Fi police," who seek out and shut down unauthorized access points and hotspots. BT is the "official communications services provider" for the Games, so access points other than the ones they set up or approve have been disallowed. A picture tweeted from the Olympics shows a gentleman carrying a portable direction antenna that can localize sources of transmission and interference.
"One possible aim of shutting down such WiFi access points is to cut down on interference with essential wireless communications being used by those refereeing, reporting on and working at the sporting events. ... The news of the WiFi crackdown has angered many of those following the Games online, who were already upset at Olympic authorities' attempts to limit the use of social networking tools at the Games at certain times. The London Olympics had been billed as the first 'social media Games,' but organizers have been accused of bungling the effort to seamlessly integrate popular technologies like Twitter and Facebook into the event."
If I were in the area, I'd be tempted to set up a few of the old linksys routers that cut out now and then in strange places (just powered, not networked).
Make it a little more challenging for them to find the real "WiFi Offenders"
The only issue being heard is about sales, ratings, etc. The rest is a bunch of buzzing mosquitoes, nothing more.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They're trying to cut down on interference, with the large volume of people at these things, is this not reasonable?
Anyone not eating official McDonalds food--prepare for an ass whipping!
--
This post brought to you by Carl's, Jr. Fuck you, I'm eating!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
BT offers paid hotspots, through BT WiFi (£5.99 for 90 minutes, £9.99 for 24 hours, £26.99 for five days), except for BT home customers and customers of mobile carriers which have sharing agreements with BT (O2 and Tesco Mobile). For anyone else, vouchers can be bought from kiosks at Olympic parks, BT told GigaOM.
"We want more money."
Actually, a good portion of human activity can be explained by that simple phrase. In this case, it's about enforcing rules guaranteeing BT certain amounts of money.
I am officially gone from
Locog doesn't want your Wifi hotspot on their property, so they forbid it and enforce the policy. If you're not put off by the commercial nature of the Olympic Games, why are you offended by this? Besides, if you were offering Wifi on your property with that many visitors, would you allow anyone to shit all over the scarce spectrum? Didn't think so.
Every single online stream for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for instace, i snow a endless loop saying "During the London 2012 Olympics, we are unable to bring you regular ABC programming in your location. This is due to the Olympic Broadcast Agreement."
Try any of the streams at http://www.abc.net.au/radio/listenlive.htm#directlinks All blocked if you're outside Australia.
Assholes. Not just sport. EVERYTHING from Australia's main broadcaster is off the air for weeks because of the fucking Olympics.
You have to wonder when the hell they will just sell naming rights and be done with it.
These "wi-fi police" are clearly infringing on the exclusive intellectual property rights of the Metropolitan Police Service, The Official Police Force of the Olympic Games®.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What we need are a few people to run the 'fakeap' program to create thousands of "access points" for them to chase :-).
1. using a directional antenna that rotates 360 degrees randomly ... pretty hard to pin-point
2. using a hotspot in the sky floating in the air
I guess it is about the time to take out the magnetron out of the microwave oven, and power them using car batteries, distribute them around Olympic venues. That will teach those police a lesson.
On a serious note, has Ofcom officially sold those unlicensed band to the IOC?
So the Olympic committee and BT can get together and prevent YOU from using the FREE portion of the spectrum that is allocated for public use, which is why everyone can use wifi routers in the first place? Nice. How can I do that? I have a price in mind for air.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Soon after, Coe backpedalled so rapidly that if he was seated backwards on a bike he'd win a gold medal in cycling.
My web domain.
C'mon Bring on the Rock! What happened to that whole 'amateur' thing .....
Really, these WIFI people should know better than to p*ss off the Ministry Of Information.
Hmmmm...bluetooth is 2.4ghz so I wonder if they would detect and shut you down?
So we have WiFi Police, and Brand Police (to protect what is really important, sponsors and their branding, even from those ungrateful unpaid athletes).
But there was a shortage in real security. Nice to see what the priorities really were for the IOC.
So, uhh, I'm a bit confused how anyone would provision outside internet access to their WiFi hotspot in the olympic park? The only answer which comes to mind is phones with built-in WiFi hotspots - but in Britain, if you're getting your phone data connection from BT (which you've paid for), why would they be able to stop you from using it?
It is, after all, a BT wifi hotspot which they have been paid for.
So the Olympic committee and BT can get together and prevent YOU from using the FREE portion of the spectrum that is allocated for public use, which is why everyone can use wifi routers in the first place? Nice. How can I do that? I have a price in mind for air.
Yea, that's how it works. The property is under the jurisdiction of a particular group, similar to how a corporation controls what happens in their buildings or you control what happens in your house. When "rogue" APs are discovered, they are located and shut down by whomever controls the facility, as you would do if your neighbour setup an AP in your home or driveway or a corporation would do if an empolyee plugged a Linksys into the network. This protects the quality of the "official" WiFi service. It also protects the revenue of the official(paid for the rights) WiFi provider within the facility.
The fish and chips shop across the street is free to blast the venue with WiFi and the so called "cops" in this case can do nothing more than politely ask that the fish and chips shop turn down the volume(signal strength). But, since the fish and chips shop has jurisdiction over their own facility, they are free to blast WiFi, right up to the legal transmission limit, if they choose. Effectively degrading the SNR for them and those in the venue where their signal overlaps. It's all pretty standard WiFi stuff.
Welcom to the planet.
1. by working hard and providing attractive product: ok
2. by embedding yourself as an oligopolisitc rent seeking parasite on the political landscape: not ok *
* but by #2 cloaking itself falsely as a capitalist force like #1, and spreading propaganda to that effect, riling up fools who believe that nonsense, such as with healthcare insurance, we can remain embedded in the body politic, and siphon off cash in a noncapitalistic way, all the while protected by idiots who think they are championing capitalism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What if they are buffering and heavily monitoring all data traffic originating in the area? Shutting down alterna-wifi will force people to use the Carnivore Connection or go without their social media. As we know, social media have been a popular way to organize and coordinate rioting and the Brits have some pretty ugly incidents in their recent memory about how out of hand things can get in a hurry.
Now certainly monitoring isn't going to stop an efficient, one word/phrase message from getting out such as a well trained organization might use. But it would let you see a bunch of amateurs aggregating and setting up. Inevitably you get clueless people posting "Hey is this where we find out what time the riot starts?" and you might just get a shot at stopping it from happening.
Besides, while police would love to have you think they can prevent crime, ultimately the nature of the tools at hand leads them to be more punishers of crimes that have already happened. Having a firm grip on the datastreams in the locality of the Games could be exactly the kind of investigative treasure trove you'd want when trying to track down who triggered the riot that resulted in the death of (insert name of country)'s Olympic delegation, for example.
I might just be crazy, but then again we have reports of men with antennae roaming the Games. I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
It seems like there's a threshold for human organizations beyond which the probability of turning into complete fucking assholes approaches 1. Grow a religion big enough and it becomes assholes in funny hats, just like the Catholics. Grow a software company big enough and it's chair-throwing assholes with buggy operating systems. Grow a sport big enough and they take something that's supposed to be about having a good time and ruin everyone else's time.
Put the IOC on the terrorism watch list.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This practice actually raises my hackles. Alarm bells and klaxxons go off. Really they have NO BUSINESS doing this dystopian crap. This is exactly the very sort of thing that makes people angry. I for one wouldn't pay those mofo's one bluidy red cent. My wifi my business not theirs. Its not a crime. And they can't make it one just because. SCREW YOU, you damn'd IOC & your lame limpicks. DIAF and all that!
This strange comment at the bottom of the message is illogical.
Fire up an AP and get ready to debate the meaning of "unlicensed spectrum" :-)
Maybe the next Olympic games they'll actually let common people buy tickets again instead of selling huge blocks to corporate sponsors who don't show up.
Naaa...
that would protect BT from other service providers.
Hopefully, the IOC wasn't dumb enough to make the administration of the games dependent on a clean WiFi environment.
They don't own the unlicensed WiFi spectrum. (Unless maybe on private property, they do?)
If someone has the right to use their cell to access the Internet, they should have the right to privately use the same connection for their laptop with a person WiFi link protected with a private password.
One protest strategy is legally buying sponser's logo and the wearing it in unflattering ways.
(Like an upside down.)
Maybe that would get the IOC to be reasonable.
It would be interesting if everybody turned on their WiFi gear in AdHoc mode for a 5 minute protest perhaps at the start of each hour.
There are very good technical reasons why this is standard operating procedure for a very large venue. While it is true that this is unlicensed spectrum, it is also shared. The collisions from rogue access points destroys usability for both the rogues and the sanctioned APs. This may not be something that you have ever had to deal with your SOHO system (although you probably did by trying to select a channel that didn't conflict with your neighbors) but it is a real problem for a large venue. You have to do this or no one will have service. (This still does not discount the greed/business reasons for BT to do this, however.)
Nobody.
And the WiFi frequencies are publicly available.
What a load of bollocks this is.
So they want you to turn off your unlicensed Wifi Hotspot?
Wifi is an unlicensed band therefore un-licensable and therefore can only be shut down if it is:
a) Interfering with licensed transmissions
b) On private property where the person is the owner or their proxy and they ask you to leave, taking your property with you or forfeit its ownership.
So because of above their own hotspot network is un-licensed so a) is out provided I am not interferring with something else. Also if you are on public property b) is out, as this includes potentially all places between venues.
So good luck with that, prepare mr Wifi-sniffer to be sued if you prevent my use of a wifi hotspot or cause to prevent by improperly calling the authorities.
In case anyone didn't realize this will be the future of the whole world if the marriage of corporations and government isn't somehow stopped.
The government has too much power, the corporations are too tightly intertwined with that power.
Individual freedom is never a benefit to those with power so will be crushed at every opportunity.
Then the laws of the UK or England must differ from the laws of the United States with respect to whether or not federal unlicensed spectrum regulations trump state trespassing laws. See previous Slashdot stores about FCC rulings: 1 2
I guess Johnny Fever was right to be afraid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTPzTG1Lx60
This couldn't happen in the US because, although companies have rights to frequencies, there aren't any exclusive areas, by design.
In fact, it seems like England doesn't either, or this physically couldn't be an issue.
I would ask for the resignation of politicians who sold off "rights" to exclusive wireless access.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The message is loud and clear : the authorities in the UK control what you
say, what you buy, how you communicate, etc.
Those who participate and those who spectate are merely cattle for those
in power.
I will never watch an Olympics again, for this reason.
I haven't watched the Olympics since I was a kid, because post-childhood I discovered that the Olypics are really all about politics, with the athleticism as a mere backdrop. Why waste my time with that when I could actually be doing something useful? All this martial law-style nonsense with social networking and WiFi is just more evidence of which I speak. Why should they care about people commenting? Or how they're connecting to the internet to do it? It's all a rediculous waste of time.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
My answer to every question about the Olympics.
Sounds to me like they chose the wrong country to host the games. Between this and arresting people for tweeting harmless complaints at athletes who failed, they might as well have picked China or North Korea to host.
They will just pay the local government with an insurance plan to cover the costs of all lawsuits for rights violations. Naturally, it will ultimately be payed by the locals going into debt for decades but they will not sell it that way.
The legal system is broken, you can't sue for enough money to force changes; they can always ends up appealing so it amounts to their pocket change (especially if spread out over YEARS in court.) I wonder how many people would speed if their tickets only cost a nickel?? Also, they wouldn't be pulled over by the police, a representative would be pulled over and they'd be notified to slow down after they reached their destination.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
events like these.
Shame on everyone.
If that's not a red flag screaming "challenge" to Anonymous, I'm not sure what is.
-Styopa
Eat Burger King, wash it down with Pepsi, and use non-BT wifi...
Hear, hear! In it's current form, the IOC needs to re-classified as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
The Summer Olympics is a two week event held every four years.
This is the first in London since 1948.
The logistical planning for events on this scale are enormously difficult. The tech has to work. Security is tight.
The costs are high.
You cannot please everyone when you try to insure that games with a global audience in the billions run smoothly and that the bills are paid.
The alternative is to restrict the games to venues where political control is absolute, and an ultra-nationalist and global-minded government pays all the bills. Berlin 1936. Beijing 2008.
It may distress the geek to discover that laws are mutable.
That they recognize special cases.
That your WiFI hotspot may sometimes have to give way to the needs of other users,
I'll set my phone up as a hot spot linked directly to my Voice carrier. Good luck shutting that down.
People can have an interest in both sport and science. Sorry if that shatters your jocks v. nerds social dichotomy.
How is the Olympics getting away with for what all intents and purposes is fascism?
Suggestion: "RFC RatFi"
Free food for WiFi-enabled rats: small hidden food dispensers (possibly mobile with positive feedback loop into the "rat media") let them in one by one with a functioning glucose-driven WiFi hotspot implant and if they don't have an implant they get one.
Please someone make this indestructible network real!
Chocolate and greasy food is a must.
Mechanics and logistics of food delivery is a major challenge (we don't want the rats camping/trailing the dispenser or getting too fat to do their job of scampering about everywhere).
Combine aggressive opportunistic use of publicly available access points to the rest of the network with other measures for wider network connection?
... maybe people wouldn't bother to bring their own. Maybe they should have gotten the IT people that put together the networking at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium to consult.
http://m.cnet.com/news/texas-size-tech-behind-super-bowl-stadium/20030328
The NFL seems to have figured out that these types of events are social as much as anything and the fans like to share the experience. The fans sharing this stuff is as much advertising for the event as anything else, maybe more so. I seriously doubt that fans sharing a couple of minutes of video here and there of events is going to hurt the broadcasters. It's just bragging rights. "See. I was there!! I took these pictures!!"
I had some sympathy, but not much, when I thought this might have to do with the logistical issues of official communications for the Olympics, but this, if accurate, is just lame.
Which is saying a lot, since there's no such thing as Windows 8 Mobile.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
yeah I got that from a list of nerdy pickup lines.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
seems 'passengers' 'disembarking' could cause some unwanted results. so you may want to hurry up and get out of port, but that often doesn't work.
if you mean getting her off, wouldn't going down on her or jacking off first so you last longer help?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
dammit I should have maintained the nautical analogy - lapping her waves, preemptively unloading?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I was just confused because I had vaguely remembered that some laws, the sort of things handled at the state level in the United States, were handled differently in the four countries: England and Wales follow UK law and English law, Scotland follows UK law and Scottish law, and Northern Ireland follows UK law and Northern Irish law.