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FCC Proposal Would Cover the US With Public Wi-Fi
pigrabbitbear writes "Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public. The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing 'super wi-fi,' as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks – especially light users and the poor – could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether."
Lobby "contributions" from Sprint, AT&T Tmobile, Comcast, Time Warner... The war chests of our representatives and senators will overflow with joy
if they defeat this.
How long before this free wifi resembles the great firewall of china?
You get what you pay for
Internet Access should be like Library Access.
It is a little different because it is for knowledge, commerce, and entertainmnet.
But it seems like a gevernment service that should provide for a populace to thrive.
Wasn't the intention of getting that spectrum which was used for analog TV to use it for such things? If it isn't suitable for such, why the change? If the new digital TV spectrum was suited for this, why was it sold?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
How many municipalities have been sued into oblivion by incumbents who cried "unfair competition"?
I sure can't see this being a means of catching political dissidents.
Wi-Spy. Ordinarily this wouldn't get past the objections of the lobbyists, but given the massive potential for spying and tracking the citizenry without need for bothersome things like warrants or requests to third parties which create a trail that exposes how often this is done, I think this may just stand a chance. It will be very interesting to me to see if this free wifi requires some sort of registration/authentication because once that happens, the anonymous Internet will take a giant leap towards extinction.
What's the source? Its a /. post of a journalist story about a journalist story about a journalist story then I gave up trying to track back.
I poked around fcc.gov and found almost nothing, so its either really old, really new, or really made up / out of context / unofficial daydream.
I'm an old time reader of FCC part 97 (and others!) so don't try to scare me off with "we need non-technical journalists to translate into prole-speak" I'm quite sure I could handle the primary source... if it actually exists.
Another thing is it won't be wifi although journalists confuse any wireless internet access with wifi. Lets say you get UHF tv channel 46 vacated and reassigned. That doesn't mean a magic firmware download, even to a SDR, will necessarily magically start working in that 662-668 MHz channel.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I thought the only essential needs were food, water and shelter.
My takehome pay just decreased again.
I'd be happy to leave my wifi open for anyone to use, and I'm sure others would too. Almost anywhere I go there are at least 3-4 wifi signals. However the internet has done a good job of telling everyone if they don't secure their internet then you will go to prison, instead of holding the actual users responsible. So most people lock up their wifi out of fear that the RIAA is going to sue them to an oblivion.
Without going into conspiracy theories and donning tinfoil hats, the idealistic situation where I can go "anywhere" and WiFi is available to me, seems nice. I wouldn't need a data plan from my ISP except for extremely rural areas where network penetration is nigh impossible.
Essentially, this is an initiative which attempts to bring everyone up-to-speed with current internet accessibility technology, and puts everyone on an equal playing ground. Folks who can't afford internet access, folks in rural areas who don't bother with internet access due to lifestyle/need or current access limitations. Elderly who often don't approach the internet world due to technology's general confusing nature.
It seems that earliest adoption should be implemented in such a fashion as to bear the most impact for the greatest number of people (e.g. low-income residences, schools, libraries, or some other demographic). But are there other, more important "everyday human" needs, which the FCC can and should address, rather than attempting to offer a public WiFi mega-network?
The government has no business spending on infrastructure. Roads, bridges, telephones, police, fire fighters, and democracy have all been bad enough for our great nation!
Use Tor, unless that's blocked somehow as well.
This may sound silly, but I think if everyone used Tor whenever they're on a public wifi hotspot, there would be fewer problems with privacy. All these horror stories of identity theft and bank info stolen etc... etc... have happened in many cases when people used unsecured wifi.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
It would be a great idea, much like antenna TV. This free Internet (don't call it WiFi), could be limited speed, limited use, and censored (like TV). Then if you want higher speeds, and uncensored you can purchase a service (either wired or wireless) similar to Cable/Satellite TV. There could even be Ads on it to pay for the service, either local ISPs or government can provide the service, or purpose built companies, like TV/Radio stations, and there could even be competition, to allow for the broadcasters to charge more for ad space.
I don't want the Federal Government running some general public access internet. Very Bad Idea.
I do want the FCC to open up existing infrastructure to alternative carriers. The current plan which allows carriers to exclude competitors is very bad.
I do want the FCC to make available bandwidth to more carriers, and to open up more bandwidth to WiFi.
I do want Congress to pass a law banning cable franchises by local and state governments.
I do want laws specifically enabling municipal internet utilities, especially on this new bandwidth.
The US government is selling off Upper L-Band TM, lower L-Band TM, and S-Band TM allocations within the next 5-10 years. Those are THE beachfront, prime spectrum bands that the US government owns that can be used for cell networks. The plan has been rolling for at least 5 years already now. It does take a while to upgrade every single test asset that the government uses to the new C-Band spectrum. It's going to take probably 75% of the money that the government will get from sale of this spectrum to pay for the upgrades (aka, tens of billions of dollars).
So, yea, they're working it. In fact, the push has become very, very sustained these last 3-4 years.
I'm not happy about the government running it censored - once the government has shown that they can keep the evil dirty porn and pirate sites blocked (Even though any script-kiddie will soon learn how to bypass this), there will be strong pressure on private ISPs to follow. Running it uncensored isn't going to fly for long politically, so it'd be better to have the government keep their hands off.
Tor won't protect you from identity theft, that's what encryption is for. Tor without encryption just tells MORE people what you are doing.
If it was free a geostationary satellite would make access available to everyone even in very remote areas. There is the ping time issue but that is a performance problem; there are commercial alternatives available to almost everyone so this would prevent the commercial providers from getting killed.
My worry is what DHS and the Jesus lobby would do with the network control.
Yeah, the ping times are the weak part of that plan. Providing internet service to 300 million devices from a single satellite is the easy part.
It's all well and good to talk about internet access being a "right" or a "public service," but please realize that simply because some government passes a law saying so, doesn't mean that wide-spread free internet access will come to pass. Take the example of my library: they are closed at times that someone might actually want to go, like in the evening after normal people from work, most of Sunday, and all major -- and most minor -- holidays. Their computer terminals seem to be something from the era of the IBM AT; and there are only 4 of them. The employees are surly and even aggressive, and don't care to be even the slightest bit helpful. And the entire building is decrepit and smells.
So I have the "right" to free information at a library (actually, I pay for it in taxes, but whatever), but the manifestation of that right is such that I don't actually want it. Yet we are expected to believe that, although our government can't run a library, despite having had hundreds of years to figure out, they're going to do a great job with modern and rapidly changing technologies. Call me pessimistic, but I don't see it happening.
The solution is to promote competition in Internet access: end the (government-created and propped-up) cable, phone, and wireless monopolies, and once there is a healthy market, let the market take care of lowering prices.
Recall that the U.S.S.R. declared food to be a basic human right, to be provided by the government. And who could argue with that, right? Yet the result was bread lines and empty shelves. In the U.S., we don't declare food to be a government-provided right, and yet we have so much food that our poor people are obese.
To preempt the flamers: no, I'm not arguing that the government should never have a role in assisting the poor (sometimes it should), or that companies are always good, or that the market is always perfect (they aren't; it's not). But I am extremely cautious in endorsing this as a good idea, for the above-stated reasons that have nothing to do with my own (non-existant) profit margins or political donations. So when others oppose it, please don't automatically ascribe such motives to them, either.
... what you think it means. "
How can these jackasses continue to use words like "free" to make it sound like they are giving a gift to the nation when we are the ones they will damn well expect to pay for it with taxes? And why arent each and every one of you calling them out for it?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Hi. If you mean held for by the government in that they manage and regulate it, then yes. That's what they're supposed to do. If you mean to imply that only the government uses it, then you're amazingly misinformed. Here's a chart that shows the usage allocation of US spectrum. The narrow bar under the spectrum indicates the primary user (commercial-only, government-only, shared)
US Frequency Allocation Table
I realize that it's a much smaller, and MUCH richer country than ours, but Singapore already does this. There, you have a choice: Use the free Gov't access, choose a different provider (or tether), or do some combination of both.
Done right, this could simply be another competitor in what will soon be a crowded field. Obviously, there's going to be some mistrust of how the gov't will use the collected data, but I would guess that the majority of people don't care enough about how (or are ignorant to the fact that) the government is going to use the tracking data for it to be anything other than a minor news story if this moves forward.
My 2 bytes.
-SM
Sorry, how about I link one made in the last 10 years.
Frequency Allocation table, August 2011
Ya. Like the government doesn't already illegally copy and store all our data they can get their hands on. And then tries to imprison the whistleblowers that let us know they were conducting these illegal acts. I can think of no one better to host my wifi sessions *rolls eyes*.
A strategy like that can only help to cut out the middleman and increase data availability. (your private data, availability to the fascist nutters.)
I'm more interested in how long it takes someone to figure out the gold standards for privacy online in today's environment and make a debian distro that enables fine grained control of these standards with ease.
When are we going to build an encrypted network on top of the internet and just cut out the government clowns?
Liberty.
I thought the only essential needs were food, water and shelter.
That's true, along with air and sleep*.
Also, needs are defined in different ways depending on circumstance, with no consensus. Certainly food is a need, but is sunshine? We get vitamin D from sunshine, and diet can't make up for lack. Sex is a biological imperative, but can at any time be put off until later.
Needs also form a sort of "hierarchy", where once you are satisfied at a certain level, adding more at that level will gain you nothing. A company can't raise morale by making the bathroom even cleaner than it is - once the bathroom is "clean enough", extra work makes no appreciable difference. Once you have enough to eat, having more doesn't make you happier.
"Safety" is also a need, and depending on the school of thought it comes before or after food and water.
Once you have several layers of needs met, you reach the layer of "self actualization", which is loosely "the need to accomplish something".
That's what this proposal addresses - the need for people to better themselves, and to do something useful with their time.
This proposal is a good idea in many ways - ethically, economically, technically, environmentally. There's no down-side that I can see.
To take one example (economics), new businesses arise from innovation built on infrastructure. This type of infrastructure will foster an enormous boon in productivity, business, employment, and general well-being of people in the country.
In the same manner that the Interstate Highway System fostered economic progress by giving companies easy access to cheap product delivery.
This is exactly the type of project that centralized government should be doing - it promotes growth, increased productivity, jobs, and general welfare. It's of benefit to the people, and not pork directed to specific selected companies.
*I hope this doesn't read as snarky - that's not my intent.
If religious groups are fighting tooth and nail against a woman's right to sexual healthcare, you can imagine how much of the Internet they would want banned on public wifi. The blacklists would be longer than both of their works of fiction combined.
Because we are reasonable people who understand that "free" can have more than one meaning, one of them being "paid for by your taxes".
You are not the rare island of sanity in the sea of lunatics that you so desperately want to be seen as. And you never will be.
We can start now: https://openwireless.org/
Why arent each and every one of you calling them out for it?
Because I already pay an Internet tax, to AT&T. I've been paying it to them for 10 years, and despite a whirlwind of technical advancement they haven't improved my service or lowered my price in a decade. In fact, my home service is more constrained and monitored than it was ten years ago.
I'm ready to try plan B.
I know you're joking, but everyone needs to realize that GPS devices don't communicate back to the GPS satellites.
Technoli
By Censorship, I meant .xxx domains, and certain ports. Yes, it would be easy to get around, but wouldn't be any different that television/radio.
I think what really needs to happen is reform of how ISPs do business and what they charge, bringing a basic level of internet service to something resembling the way basic wired telephone service used to be, so that all but the most poverty-striken can get access to it for a very low price. Let's face it: if all you need is a "subsistence" level of internet access (enough for email, slow but usable web access, no streaming of movies, large downloads, or online gaming) then you only need 1Mb/sec (or less) on the downstream side, right? With the way web pages are bloated with Flash and Javascript these days they would load as slow as pages loaded when dialup was the norm, but it'd be better than nothing, right? That's what I think needs to happen.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Cringe. Cower. Cry.
You are right to be paranoid, you are in the wrong to have suggested these technologies without really understanding how they work and are endangering others.
Let me give you a few facts off the top of my head. Cosmetic details may be inaccurate, but this is the kernel of truth.
1) Tor hides the origin of your traffic from the recipient
2) Tor makes attempts to hide you from traffic analysis, but is not robust against traffic analysis attacks.
3) Some of the largest exit nodes in the world would cost upwards of $1M per month to run based upon traffic patterns -- this strongly suggests state funded intelligence.
4) About three years ago, hundreds of embassy email accounts and passwords were compromised doing *exactly* what you suggest -- including US, Israeli, Russian...
Here's the deal -- tor hides your traffic origins and destinations. This only works IF you have it set up correctly. If you just downloaded it -- you almost certainly leak flash, DNS, and java.
Even if you downloaded a package, flash is likely to leak.
Even if you do it all right, I know how to start leaking privacy by fucking with custom and faked DNS settings buried in a recipient page, but that's beyond the scope here.
The bottom line:
Using tor without encryption is more dangerous the un-encrypted content of your websites than *ANYTHING* else, unless you don't care if anyone in the middle can read everything you send and receive, but not know who you are based on the content. Even without admitting the practical malicious nature of node operators, it's less secure because you're bouncing plaintext over more nodes with more opportunities to intercept and read or edit.
Using it without an SSL observatory with a fixed key is probably also substantially dangerous, but I am not personally aware of such attacks having been catalogued in the wild (over TOR -- they have happened over the web as a whole).
If you disagree with any of this you either:
1) Don't understand TOR and how it works.
2) Quite possibly do correctly understand how browser based https/tls security works, but don't actually understand the modern threat/capability landscape and realize that one of the key points of trust is utterly compromised.
3) Are more paranoid than even me. Good for you --please explain your objection.
So yes, for once you will get what you pay for. No longer can a service say they give you 10mb/s, and then only deliver 1. In an environment where there are free choices, even monitors censored choices, lying about speed will result in significant loss of customers
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Microsoft is pushing hard for this one.... Might just save their business.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Comcast it is.
I don't think you know what tax means.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I didnt suggest in any way that I was more sane than anyone else. I asked why all those capable of understanding that "free" != "paid for by taxes" (no matter how many mental gymnastics you're willing to go through to say otherwise), arent even bothering to point the simple truth of it out anymore.
It takes a pretty solid application of denial to come to any other conclusion. But what angers me is that what appears to be the majority of Americans dont even try anymore. They see "free" and say, "Hey! Great! I'm so glad I am so well cared for!" instead of actually thinking the whole thing through. Is it laziness? Intellectual dishonesty? Or do people actually believe that these services will continue to magically materialize without someone cutting the damn check for it?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Tor is encrypted.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Sounds more like you just want plan A with a different provider. Plan B involves actually changing the conditions that put you where you are, which you apparently arent in favor of since you are in favor of this "free" public wifi shit.
"His name was James Damore."
What would happen when the CopyRight police; MPAA, RIAA and Book Associations find material being downloaded? How does the provider find the offender and who gets the 3, 6 strikes?
As far as I can tell the only information available on this is what Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post says about it. Absolutely everything else seems to be simply a rewrite of her article. Given the track record of any popular media reporting on technical issues it is hard to tell for sure what the proposal actually entails.
This being a non-classified Government proposal circulating freely among businesses, it should be readily available to the public somewhere.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
It also means the government wouldn't need to subpoena records of your internet activity from a third party, since they would already have it.....
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
. . . and every phone must have GPS enabled (for safety of course), so that someone can know where everyone is all the time (for safety and rescue), and how fast they are moving at any given moment (to make sure the roads are safe, and incidentally charge you for road usage). And maybe we'll chip all of the children like we now chip pets, so we can always identify them and return them to their parents. Think of the children!
It's not encrypted from the exit node (How could it be? This is where the Tor network interfaces with the normal internet.).
Tor does have an advantage in that exit nodes are usually chosen somewhat at random and are switched often. You would get hours of someone's traffic at an unsecured wifi hotspot. As a Tor exit node, you would get a few minutes each of a thousand different people.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I live up in Canada. My car insurance, electrical power, natural gas, water, and waste treatment are all provided as government-owned (that is to say, owned by *me*) utilies. Our rates are lower than the private rates in nearby provinces.
I'm currently charged exorbitant amounts of money for internet access by a private ISP (the local cable company). I would *love* for the city to take over last-mile Internet connectivity, and then a bunch of independent ISPs could offer different packages for upstream connectivity. As it stands you have two choices for Internet access, the phone company or the cable company.
Anything passed the exit node is not part of Tor. I have observed the exit node to change sometimes with every click.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
It's a convenient way for people to register for blocks of time, and to make sure that people aren't hogging the computers.
No, that's not going to work. This is American politics we're dealing with.
Every special interest with lobbyists will step in with demands. The RIAA and MPAA will obviously want all pirate sites blocked, that hardly needs stating. But then the anti-gambling pressure groups will follow. The 'for the children' people will start demanding sites providing suicide advice or promoting anorexia be blocked. And as for the porn, it won't be the .xxx domain that's blocked: Before the network is even running, the very powerful social conservative faction will have put all their considerable might into making sure that all porn is blocked within the limits of technological capability. These are all things that one faction or another has been trying to have banned with mixed success for years or decades - dating back at least to the old Comstock laws that made it a criminal offense to send obscene material through the US postal service. Politically, it's very hard to ban these on privately run networks, but very easy to do so on a government-run network. The advantage politically shifts. That's before you even get into the heavy bandwidth-reduction methods that would be needed to keep costs down.
Or put it this way; we don't know what Plan B should be, but the benchmark for measuring its success is pretty simple. Whatever it takes to be able to tell AT&T, Time Warner, Windstream, etc. to go fuck themselves sideways and really mean it. Like we do when selecting a supermarket. Real competition (municipal broadband included) without pricing collusion would allow that.
The implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
You must be a member of Congress. Because those are the only people I can possibly imagine wwho would actually suggest that as a legitimate definition of "free" without busting out laughing mid-sentance.
Why would you suggest roads are free? Same as libraries, or traffic lights, or police. They are NOT FREE, and I've never heard anyone use the word free to describe them. They are built by government (local/state/fed) and used by all, but no one ever says they are free. They all cost money, and ultimately that money all comes from the pockets of the citizens. Only the dishonest, the dillusional or the ignorant would say anything less.
Maybe your philosophy is exactly why we're as fucked as we are. Either you're willing to lie, or willing to spin a bunch of BS that makes it sound like the taxpayer isnt actually putting out any of their income to make these "free" things possible.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
From entry node to exit node, but not from exit node to destination.
1 - The carriers wont allow it.
2 - Federal government will never support something that you cant track.
This may sound silly...
It does sound silly, because people on a public wi-fi hotspot rarely care what sites you're going to, which is the only thing Tor effectively hides. Sure, it also encrypts data locally, so the people on your same hotspot can't steal credentials, session cookies, or data. It just doesn't encrypt the traffic coming out of the Tor exit node, where you are almost guaranteed that someone is snooping for credentials, session cookies, and data. You've just turned a bad situation into a worse one.
The correct solution is to use HTTPS. Always on public Internet access points, use HTTPS.
I will repeat myself: All things not a part of Tor are not a part of Tor.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Easy. Instead of using microwave transmissions, just use lasers. 300 million tiny lasers on a satellite to follow and track each receiver. Well, maybe more like 1200 million - your car, your phone, your MP3 player and your home computer. Might as well just go for 2 billion of them, just to have a little extra capacity.
Of course these would have to be more than a couple of watts each to punch through the clouds and such.
Now that I would like to see... a satellite with an output of maybe 20 gigawatts.
I do want Congress to pass a law banning cable franchises by local and state governments.
I do want laws specifically enabling municipal internet utilities, especially on this new bandwidth.
Aren't those two items mutually exclusive? Most of the "municipal internet utilities" would end up using coax cable, just like Time Warner/Comcast/Cablevision/etc.
The FCC proposes buying BACK spectrum? That will cost money, lots of it.
Who exactly will build out this nation-wide network of WiFi accesspoints and backbone infrastructure on brand-new spectrum incompatible with current WiFi cards?
Who, exactly, will decide what will and will not be accessible on this network?
Who, exactly, will decide the build-out schedule, which areas get served first? WHich don't get served (think 1%ers)?
Who, exaclty, will retain their own contracted ISP service once this free "nation-wide" WiFi network is available?
Who, exactly, will decide the speed of the access available?
And please, define "nationwide" - I know what that word means to me, but do you really mean WiFi Internet service in remote corners of national parks?
This is a proposal that should have been floated in the silly-season of the Presidential election last year, where it would be viewed as the pie-in-the-sky dream it truely is.
Ken
I'm sure there'd be no problem "working" a satelitte connection from inside a building - your XM Radio and GPS work fine in parking garages, don't they?
Ken
No, they have it all figured out - what they'll do is add a surcharge to every ISP account to underwrite the national infrastructure, then, as subscribers drop their paid ISP accounts to instead use the free WiFi service, the Gov't will simply raise the fee on those that remain on paid ISP accounts. Eventually only the top 1%ers will have their own ISP accounts, and they will subsidise the entire Free WiFi infrastructure for the other 99% of America from their vast resources.
WHat, why wouldn't that work? Eventually the 1%ers will foot the bill for everything!
Ken
First thing I'd do is automatically set a random MAC address on every connection.
I approve. Hell, it's one of my pet ideas. Simple! Take a bit of TV frequency, and let people use it for wifi, just as they do now. Except that it goes through walls. Buildings. Neighborhoods. Set up the ol' mesh network idea with a frequency band that actually works, and you have ISP independence. The bandwidth of a TV channel is huge, so streaming video might even work on a shared network such as this. If we ever lick the "interference" problem, which is a software limitation, not a physical one, we could transform the world. No hyperbole. Add encryption, and the old internet is back, baby.
I'd own it and have them all aim at you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Somebody's clock was messed up.
This is way too good to believe that anybody in the US federal government would suggest such a brilliant idea.
They shouldn't have done HD TV the way they did. It should have been setup around a broadcasted packet network over a really wide band. Initially, it could be handled as they did, with auctions for bandwidth. But we'd have the infrastructure ready to go for the future.
Going digital should have included the division of the airwaves - instead we have an analog split of frequencies severely limiting use of a limited PUBLIC resource to a few monopolies.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So what you're saying is if my destination is a Tor exit node, then I don't need to worry about encryption, but if my destination is my bank, I should still worry about encryption. Thanks for clearing that up.
For years I have watched U.S. cities, small and large try to set up one wireless internet system after another, they have never made it work.
Tor without encryption just tells MORE people what you are doing.
It's more precise to say that it tells MORE people what SOMEONE is doing, although precisely who is very difficult to determine provided that certain precautions are observed (not logging into your POP3 mail server using an unencrypted channel routed through TOR, as the Iranian diplomats did, comes to mind). The point after all is to disguise the origin, content and return destination of unencrypted traffic while it's traversing the TOR circuit , not what was actually sent to or requested from a destination on the public Internet. Exit nodes can and probably do sniff or log traffic exiting onto the public Internet and going back over the TOR circuit. However, the origin or final destination of that traffic remains obscure to the Exit node itself provided that traffic itself doesn't inherently suggest it's own destination, as in the aforementioned unencrypted POP3 login example. Although it's true that there have been some published attacks on the TOR network, none to my knowledge have been shown to be either practical or complete and all of them were easily thwarted by more nodes, more users and more traffic which increases the number of possible end to end paths and imposes prohibitive costs on those trying to corner the market in available intermediate nodes. Of course, many things are possible given enough time, money and effort so it's still best to avoid pissing off first world nations using the TOR network, as Mr. Assange is now acutely aware.
If you just downloaded it -- you almost certainly leak flash, DNS, and java.
Which is why it's best to use a TOR bundle, with leaky plugins absent and a portable browser settings preset to proper defaults, instead of trying to retrofit an existing browser installation.
Even without admitting the practical malicious nature of node operators, it's less secure because you're bouncing plaintext over more nodes with more opportunities to intercept and read or edit.
But only at the exit nodes, unless the intermediate "hop" nodes on the circuit are also in cahoots (possible, but unlikely). It was my understanding that the plaintext was only visible at the exit nodes, the TOR circuit itself remains encrypted so that intermediate nodes cannot decrypt the contents of the traffic intended for downstream destinations. That is after all the entire point of TOR.
where the local government only allows cell towers to be built if they're part of a company controlled by a local judge.
Ewwww how lonely can you be.
Wouldn't Nancy (government in general) love to get their testi... er tentacles on the internet. What better way to better control content?
Not really, because the exit noted rotate regularly, so after a few seconds some OTHER exit node would be seeing the data.
So instead of just one "bad guy" snooping one exit node (and other bad guys between there and the destination), you have the potential for more people seeing some data in the clear.
Yes, you should still worry about encryption. Tor isn't magic pixie dust for your packets.
I would like to point out that the Washington Post story is a complete myth. Sorry to all those having wet dreams about free net access. See ArsTechnica: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/wi-fi-as-free-as-air-the-totally-false-story-that-refuses-to-die/