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Hotel Group Asks FCC For Permission To Block Some Outside Wi-Fi
alphadogg writes The FCC will soon decide whether to lay down rules regarding hotels' ability to block personal Wi-Fi hotspots inside their buildings, a practice that recently earned Marriott International a $600,000 fine. Back in August, Marriott, business partner Ryman Hospitality Properties and trade group the American Hotel and Lodging Association asked the FCC to clarify when hotels can block outside Wi-Fi hotspots in order to protect their internal Wi-Fi services.
From elsewhere in the article: During the comment period, several groups called for the agency to deny the hotel group’s petition.
The FCC made clear in October that blocking outside Wi-Fi hotspots is illegal, Google’s lawyers wrote in a comment. “While Google recognizes the importance of leaving operators flexibility to manage their own networks, this does not include intentionally blocking access to other commission-authorized networks, particularly where the purpose or effect of that interference is to drive traffic to the interfering operator’s own network,” they wrote.
You can passively block it, yes. There's nothing preventing you from building a Faraday cage around your home. You cannot ACTIVELY block it though (i.e. broadcast signals to intentionally interfere with it).
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
More or less. If you build a faraday cage around your house, that's legal. If you build a jammer, that is illegal.
It seems like jammers are bad because you can't control the range of their effectiveness. On the other hand faraday cages tend to block more frequencies than you'd like, ex. you probably also would block cell reception.
Spoiler: poorly built and by-design ("powerline networking") modern networking equipment - of the sort that provides access to Google & co. services - does more to render a wide spectrum unusable than any by-design jamming solution of a specific frequency range.
So, while Marriott are cunts, other players ought to begin by clearing up their own yards.
Why yes, the balance shifts in places like hotel conference centers, where many people use their own, personal hotspots precisely so they can better lock down confidential information. Please. This is a naked money grab. No more charging $thousands just for an Internet connection at a trade show.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
You can make a jammer just by stabbing a knife into the safety door switch of a microwave oven. Illegal as hell, but it'll certainly knock out wireless for some radius.
There's nothing preventing you from building a Faraday cage around your home.
Not the best idea in the World for a hotel though. Killing your guest's cell phones is not liable to earn you many repeat customers and there's always the issue of First Responders needing working communications if there's ever a disaster or EMS call on your property....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I wonder if Cisco happens to sell a nifty WLAN management console that would let me identify those 'rogue' APs and knock them out, by any chance?
Yes, precisely; Cisco is lobbying in favor of one of their features here. Some of their enterprise-level routers have features with names like "containment" that involve "managing" which wifi signals are available in which locations.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Great, so now if I want to run a personal hotspot in my hotel room, I have to spoof both the SSID *and* the MAC Address of the Hotel's AP so their security software doesn't realize that it's not theirs, and run it at a high enough power level to drown out the "real" hotel AP so I can connect to it.
Is that really better for security?
So I hotel could build a structure that make cellphones useless inside of it, that make calling 911 not work? That disconnected cops and ambulance workers from connecting to HQ through whatever radio frequency they use? I am sort of thinking that would be illegal as well.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Looks like the hotels are claiming this is security and performance related.
Maybe. If the mobile hotspot is called "Marriot Free Wi-Fi" but is operated by someone collecting information on anyone who connects. Then again, this could happen anywhere. This is why you don't connect to strange wi-fi networks. If you must connect to your hotel's wi-fi network, make sure you're connecting to the right one, not just one with the same name. The solution here is guest education (post signs about which Wi-Fi network to connect to, etc), not running a jammer to block everyone else's Wi-Fi signals.
My off-the-shelf router handles multiple wi-fi networks just fine. I connect to my Wi-Fi and my performance isn't degraded because my neighbors run Wi-Fi networks of their own. A hotel should be able to invest in the infrastructure to provide their own Wi-Fi that will work regardless of whether or not I turn my phone's Wi-Fi hotspot on.
The "security" and "performance" claims are garbage. The real reason is that they want to be able to sell you their Wi-Fi service for a ton of cash and it's hard to do this when you can bring your own Wi-Fi network in with you. As gurps_npc pointed out, if we let them do this, how long until they block all cell phone signals because it interferes with the "security and performance" of their phone system?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I always find that interesting. The high-end hotels, charging hundreds of dollars per night, also charge outrageous fees such as $20 for 24 hours of internet access, two dollars for a local phone call, etc. The $50 motels give you all of that for no extra charge. The only explanation I can come up with is that the high rollers just expense it all and don't care about the cost.
Would you book a place that mentions complaints along the lines of "The bathroom is clean, but cell phones of any provider don't work here and the room phone is 2 dollars per minute?"
As for the employer: the travel offices of big companies who regularly have their people work on site at major customer or other offices will consider putting their employees somewhere else if they all complain about a particular hotel. The repeat customer is not the individual person, but the employer.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
IIRC, it didn't jam the radio signal at all. The in-house wi-fi system simply issued packets under false pretenses, causing clients of nearby hotspots to lose connection to those hotspots. And every time they'd reconnect, the in-house wi-fi would do it again.
The real answer is get Marriott's in-house wi-fi to DDoS the ever-lovin' shit out of itself. There has to be a tipping point where the amount of disruptive attack packets they're sending basically floods their network. If you just rigged up a box full of AP's and clients that are set to maintain a high-capacity, high-availability connection to each other at all costs, wheeled it in like it was a cart of otherwise normal trade-show gear, then fired it up and let it catch the attention of that disrupt-all-competitors system, it would basically be a massive packet sink and would bring down the disruptive wi-fi system. And the important part is that it wouldn't be because of anything you did, but because of their shitty anti-competitive system. If the system didn't do that, it wouldn't have DDoS'ed itself and your cart of "wanking wi-fi" would do nothing beyond using some electricity.
In many cases, I'll take a United flight if there is up to a $50 or maybe even more difference. Between having a United credit card and flying them relatively often, I get a bunch of things that I don't get on any other airline (except southwest). Free checked bags have actual value. I may not use them every time, but even on shorter trips, I often like to buy local beers that aren't available in my town which can't be carried on (and if I am not going to check bags, I can go with the cheaper flight). I get priority boarding and extra privileges when it comes to changing seats/flights. Priority boarding is super handy because I seem to end up on a lot of planes like CRJ-700s where you will get stuck gate-checking your carryon if you are in a late boarding group. I get a couple lounge-passes a year...not helpful most of the time, but great if a flight gets delayed or cancelled (both for somewhere to hang out, and because the customer service agents in the lounge are more helpful than the ones at the gate). $200 difference on a $300 flight? No way, save me the money
And in terms of employer paid airfare? Who cares. When I have travelled for work, I generally fly whatever airline has the times I need...it isn't about the price, it is about the flight that gets me there in time for the meeting...never heard a client complain that I could have saved $200 if I took the 5AM flight instead of the 7AM. If there are multiple options, sure, maybe I would opt for a slightly more expensive United flight if I wanted the extra benefits....but that cost difference pales in comparison to the cost of me going there (since my time is billed hourly). Finally, if you have status, you could actually be saving the company/client money. For instance, say that my boss only flies business class. If he has enough status on one airline to book seats that get upgraded...he can book a coach fare and get upgraded for less money than the business class ticket.
Bottles.
CSB
I flew to Detroit one Friday evening to do an update on our servers there. AIX major release update, Informix major update release and our Warehouse Manager System major update. I told my boss it was crazy to do all 3 of those in one weekend, but they insisted on it because they were cheap bastards and expected everything would run smoothly. Of course it didn't, but that's another story.
So, I get to this hotel which apparently my employer had a relationship with - it's where they put up everybody that comes to visit Detroit. There's a party on my floor. It's overrun with high school kids drinking and carrying on and I've got to get up at 5 AM to go to work and I just flew in from mountain time so that's like 3 AM to me and I'm an insomniac anyway so I'm lucky to get to sleep by 2 AM most nights.
I called the front desk a bunch of times to ask them to please do something about the noise. The last call to them I told them I was going to call the police next if they didn't shut the party down. Of course, the party kept on going. I picked up the phone and tried to call the cops. I didn't call 911 because it wasn't exactly an emergency, but I found out that I had no local phone service in my hotel room. WTF? I've heard of outrageous phone charges for using local services in hotels, but never have I not had local phone service available. I'm pretty sure the guy at the front desk was friends with the teens partying in the hotel.
I guess he didn't count on me having a cell phone.
5 minutes later, the cops showed up and busted up the party. I don't think they made any arrests. And when I related this incident to my employer they simply didn't give a shit and continued to use that hotel as the place to put up their guests. 5 minutes is good response time, but the police station was literally a stone's throw from the hotel property - and it was Warren, not Detroit.
So the point of my story is I think hotels can treat everyone like shit and people will keep using them.