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EFF And Others Push For Open Wifi APs Everywhere
netbuzz writes "Forging ahead with an initiative that proved controversial when introduced last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and nine other groups today are advancing the Open Wireless Movement to encourage ubiquitous sharing of Internet access. 'We envision a world where sharing one's Internet connection is the norm,' said EFF Activist Adi Kamdar, in a press release. 'A world of open wireless would encourage privacy, promote innovation, and benefit the public good, giving us network access whenever we need it. And everyone — users, businesses, developers, and Internet service providers — can get involved to help make it happen.'"
We envision a world where sharing one's Internet connection is the norm,' said EFF Activist Adi Kamdar, in a press release. 'A world of open wireless would encourage privacy, promote innovation, and benefit the public good, giving us network access whenever we need it.
The person sharing their connection has to NOT be concerned with being successfully sued.
Some judges realize that IP != person, others do not.
I lived with roommates, and it was somewhat of a concern that the "owner" of the internet account will be the one responsible for anything that may get tied to that IP address.
...the EFF is willing to back me up with unlimited legal support when the FBI comes knocking at my door because my next door neighbors turn out to be pedos, I'm all for it.
How do they think this will work in a world where we're all getting dinged for bandwidth? If connections were still unlimited, great, but otherwise this is a bit of a non-starter.
That's the point. If everybody opened their WiFi AP, then an IP address will become meaningless as a way of identifying a person to arrest or sue.
It'll never happen though, what's to stop all the neighborhood leeches from freeloading off my cable modem and save themselves $50 a month?
It's a nice idea but with the law as it stands if I open up my connection and someone uses it to download copyright music or films (or worse) it will be me that gets the warning letters, the police knocking at the door or gets my connection cut off. And anyone wanting to commit an on-line crime is far more likely to do it using someone elses connection than their own.
If everybody opened their WiFi AP, then an IP address will become meaningless as a way of identifying a person to arrest or sue.
It's already meaningless. I'm not impressed.
...under the premise that no individual can be held responsible, by any kind of state of the surveillance or police type, for what others do. But wait. Let's turn this argument around. If technology did exist to ensure that no individual could be held responsible for what either he or others do, then this would be quite the act of opposition to the states you and I live in: Western European states, the USA - i.e. surveillance and police states.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
It'll never happen though, what's to stop all the neighborhood leeches from freeloading off my cable modem and save themselves $50 a month?
Bandwidth limits on unknown users. If all they need to do is check their email and read the web, then you could have 20 such leeches and never really notice it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Before the US court system says you're liable for everyone on your connection, getting free internet was great. You'd go to any place in the city and have a chance of getting wifi. Then for some reason by the law enforcers, this was hated, and they even started hunting "unsecure" locations with cantennas. I'd love to go back to the day where I can go into the city and find internet for free without having to trek to a store.
God spoke to me
And everyone — users, businesses, developers, and Internet service providers — can get involved to help make it happen.
That just made an executive at an ISP laugh really, really hard.
Better known as 318230.
When I lived in SF I set up my home network to provide free wireless to the coffee shop at the end of the block.
QOS routing prevented guest bandwidth from interfering with my own. I put the wireless thing outside my firewall to protect my network.
Occasional casual monitoring suggested that no-one abused the network from either a bandwidth or content point of view. And the only thing it had protecting it was a "please don't abuse this or I'll take it down" welcome message.
TL/DR: Most people are basically good, so it (like wikipedia) works and isn't abused as much as you might thing..
You know how everywhere you (in residential areas, mostly) you see APs with names like '2WIRE123' (to pick just one) all the time? Or out in public, 'attfreewifi' at McDonald's, Starbucks, etc.? AT&T (and the rest) should configure their residential products to have, say, 10% of your total bandwidth optionally made available with a separate standard SSID (like 'Free2WIRE' or something) that is separated from your main network. (So strangers can't print, browse shared resources, play 'Macarena' through your AirPort Express, etc.)
ISPs who are also cell providers (like AT&T) will be happy to save some cellular bandwidth. Yes, they like charging for big plans and overages (and tethering, and everything else they can think of, the greedy bastards) but they really do want to save relatively expensive cellular bandwidth also. As they tell me via text every time I approach my limit for the month, "Tip: Mobile Data is unlimited over WiFi."
It would also save you from having to ask friends with secured APs what their password is. A) it's a bit of a pain, B) it's a bit awkward, C) if they're serious about security they won't want to share it in the first place, and D) if it's long and complex it's REALLY a pain.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You're so right. Cower and be scared of the law! Don't even do things which are legal, but might be construed as undesirable by your Masters. Lower your head and try not to be noticed as you hide in the flock.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Routers that support guest access are quite common these days. I've got two of them in my lounge (a Virgin Media supplied SuperHub and a Buffalo Airstation that I actually use for wireless). To be honest, guest users are only going to be as secure as their connections to their websites, so if they're not using https, then anyone could sniff their connections (that's where HTTPS Everywhere comes in useful).
If I ever get into the rare situation you describe, then I'll just have to use a different computer while they investigate my current one. No big deal - if I relied on the contents of my computer, then it could easily be lost if the machine got stolen or crashed.
People seem to be very scared of sharing their internet on this forum, but in real life, I've never heard of anyone expressing these kinds of concerns. I think you're more likely to be struck by lightning than get into trouble for an open wireless access point.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
They may get what they wish for as it's happening already, but when it arrives it they will come to realise it wasn't what they wanted.
There are already companies that allow you to re-sell your access point bandwidth. It's not rocket science. They just provide you with a router than is also a captive portal. You get to use it for free of course, but if foreigner logs into it they charge them for the bandwidth and split the fee with you. In fact most paid for captive portals operate on this basis already.
In theory this should be a win-win for everybody. It sending a byte over a land line generally costs between 1/10 and 1/100 of sending the same byte over a commercial 3G/4G network. So the mobile user gets cheap ubiquitous data and the land line owner gets to make a little money on the side.
In practice, right now, that isn't how it's working out. Somehow these captive portal operators manage to make data on these networks more expensive than the commercial 3G/4G networks. But one day someone will figure out how to make it work, and on that day a new competitor the current 3G/4G networks will arise, and it will be in the form of millions of 802.11 microcells dotted around the country. I bet they know it's coming, but don't have a clue what to do about it. They will find themselves in the same position as music publishers, newspapers, TV - except in this case it will be a case of the internet eating its own.
As I said, even though I consider this almost a long term certainty and it is what the EFF is asking for now, it isn't what the EFF actually wants. The EFF wants open access points so people can send and receive information anonymously. In this new world order every access point will be open, but every byte will be paid for, and thus tied to a credit card.
On my little consumer-grade cisco* router I have dd-wrt installed. It has quite a few options. I can set up a Hot Spot, allocate bandwidth, restrict access, adjust the txpower, and so on. I've never gone so far as to set up a Hot Spot, but I'm quite sure it would be easy enough to have a user-agreement wall. I'd be just as comfortable with something like that as I'd be with WEP. And then there's OpenDNS and such.
And I'd find it strange that government, which seems to operate on utilitarian principles, would fail to see the "greater good" in providing positively-used access to far more people than the fewer who'd comprise the abusive. Regarding the FBI (or others) raiding homes because of abuse, it seems in most situations a more hypocritical rather than critical response. In 'my' town, some beast had been out on his boat while connected to an open AP at one of the nearby condominiums. He'd been doing nasty things, apparently. The FBI raided the unit of the condo AP in the middle of the night, nearly killing the innocent couple by shock. Odd that they couldn't have sniffed the waves first and perhaps deduced a remote host. As advanced as they are, and for all their budget, they sure seem primitive sometimes. I have my doubts though.
I think we can see how well our post-911 hysteria has worked for us. Everyone's a terrorist now, but hardly anyone is terrorizing. We're spending enormous amounts of liberty and money on departments and agencies that are primarily self-serving. Departments like the DHS are bridging dangerous gaps between the DoD and local law-enforcement. And for all the collective efforts of our militant angelic protectors, safety hasn't increased much. We're petrified of bogeymen, yet we fill the role ourselves through social indifference and mainstream-media-administered xenophobia. It's mildly ironic that we're petrified that our networks will be abused for pedophilia, but we now lend our children without hesitation to the TSA. The yield of fear is golden indeed.
Self protection is good, and I'd not advise every soccer-mom to open their WiFi necessarily; but I can't see any benefit in building our society on principles of fear and self-imposed disadvantages, especially while so many viable sources for fear are above, not below the law.
And finally, the typical ISP competition duopoly between two gluttonous villains is not so great for many people. It's expensive, and many broadband (FIOS) subscribers never use much more than could be offered by DSL. And take note; in my area, DSL is not offered -- only cable or FIOS.
But playing the social board-game of Divide & Conquer is fun enough. After all, we're all our own unique snowflakes, and we should emphasize it as much as possible. Anything else would result in hippies, pirates, pedophiles, communists and zombies taking over our streets, eating our children and using our toothbrushes.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
It'll never happen though, what's to stop all the neighborhood leeches from freeloading off my cable modem and save themselves $50 a month?
Your ability to throttle or ban them at any time for any reason at all including amusement.
I'd like to provide public access, but I don't want trolls and other idiots getting my IP banned everywhere or criminally investigated. What I'd like to see is some kind of VPN-only / proxy-only access to the Internet. The idea is that I'm giving you access but not identity.
You'd be required to proxy through either your own server (ssh/openvpn), the Tor network, or some kind of commercial VPN/proxy service. I mean, you ought to be doing that anyway. All common ports, *especially* http/https, would be blocked.
That doesn't stop someone from ssh'ing into their hijacked zombie computer in Russia and using that to launch an attack, which could still lead to a criminal investigation if they didn't cover their tracks properly, but at least it'll hopefully stop the sysadmins and bots who assume "IP address == person responsible" from reflexively laying down the banhammer on my IP or suing me for allegedly sharing The_Hobbit_An_Unexpected_Journey_4K_xvid_LEAKED_plus_soundtrack.rar
Solution: Set SSID to "Have You Tried 'password'?"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The MPAA/RIAA will fight that like hell. They probably already have a law for that just waiting to be lobbied through congress. In France, they managed Sarkozy's governement to pass HADOPI, which include a 1500 euros fine for unsecured WiFi access. Of course this is just unaplicable, and nobody has been convicted yet despite country-wide law violations, but still, they have a weapon.
I was surprised last year when I first saw an article from EFF suggesting that we open our wifi networks. I did see some reason to support what they were suggesting, but I was also anxious about opening up my LAN, weak as wireless encryption may actually be. Since then, I bought a new wireless router, which does make it easy to offer separate WLANs with configurable levels of access to each other. I see TLS being used more widely. I've learned a bit about VPNs, and set up OpenVPN on my router. And, I read the article others have mentioned in this thread, that Bruce Schneier, who both knows more than I do and has more to worry about, doesn't bother securing his wireless, since it's really not the security vulnerability that it's made out to be.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html
But most important, I worry that a lot of the structure of IT, and especially IT security, tends to foster an individualistic and cautious outlook that needs the balance of the considerations of fostering community. Of course, offering security advice is a service to the community, but it's worth arguing for something that explicitly supports an open community, now and then.