>I would argue that spam impairs my ability to use my computer
The computer displays Spam without a problem, you're the one that has a problem dealing with it. But the ruling didn't talk about you, it talked about the computer.
If they wanted to use their right to restrict his access, they could have bounced his e-mail or deleted it before employees read it. They didn't, so they forgot to use that right.
When you go out in public with your kids, you're taking a risk of somebody walking up and saying something you don't want them to hear. As a company connecting to the public Internet, they risk being sent e-mails they don't want to show their employees. If they want to shield from that, they may. But if they don't, that's their problem, nobody's gonna do it for them.
One other interesting thing... notice how Intel isn't bringing up a libel charge, which means they're quietly not bothering to claim that what he said in the disputed e-mail wasn't true?
Verisign operating much of the Internet's infrastructure??? Please, spare me.
Unfortunately, to the non-techie Verisign's two services are critical to their use of the Internet. The non-techie can't navigate the Internet without DNS, and they're gonna walk away from any site with a self-issued SSL cert because of the scary browser warnings...
I think he's refering to the fact that by default www.google.com presents its interface in English, while www.google.de presents its interface in German and www.google.it presents its interface in Italian.
www.google.co.uk is another English interface, but unlike www.google.com it offers a mode to search only UK sites. It's likely presumed that English-speaking users use their own localized Google site rather than the USA site for better performance.
If you beleive that, then most terrorist attacks would be unpreventable. Afterall in a thwarted terror attack, they were just planning to _____________. They got all the stuff and wrote out exactly how they were gonna do it, but they didn't do it yet.
Conspiracy to committ a crime is a crime, and we'd be rather stupid to erase that law off the books.
It's well-placed in the show, in that it's the name of the clock used to time Fear Factor-ish stunts. NetZero's logo then appears at that point and remains on the screen next to the clock. The show also features the Circuit City Big Screen used for all visual games...
It's kind of like how on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Regis always asked AT&T to connect the contestant with their Phone-A-Friend friend and AT&T stays up for the duration of the call.
What this also tells the advertisers is that 30 seconds of no-content sales pitches don't work, but nobody's going to fast forward when Brooke Burns calls the clock on Dog Eat Dog the "NetZero Countdown Timer".
Keep it small and unintrusive and we'll put up with you, sponsors.
TiVo's doing this the right way. They're not telling the ad execs who skipped their ad, they're telling the ad execs how many people skipped their ad... 80% of the people watching the show you sponsored over a TiVo think your ad wasn't worth their time.
In contrast, TiVo points out that there almost always are several ads that air during the Super Bowl that actually get people to rewind back to them to see the ad again... wow, an ad that's so good people actually want to see it, what a concept!
TiVo's good at brokering this kind of compromise between the industry and end users, as opposed to Microsoft whose DVR errored in being too pro-industry and ReplayTV whose DVR errored in being too anti-industry. TiVo seems to be able to come up with a product that both expands user's abilities and keeps the industry lawyers away...
Palladium's intent is to create a system where information is trapped within the system, and any transfer of that infomation is properly documented. It's a great thing in a goverment situations where an accurate audit trail is something some people are always trying to get while others are trying to destroy it. (We can't comment on how well Palladium works because it's not done being made...)
Of course, Palladium is the enemy of anybody who calls non-accountabilty by it's more positve name, anonymity. Nothing's anonymous in Palladium's world, which pretty much indicates that there are some people who don't want to go anywhere near Palladium. As long as Palladium isn't forced on anybody, we're still okay, and there's been no talk of that.
Somehow, I think AMD and nVidia will always choose to offer non-Palladium hardware, and Linux will always be there. As long as non-Palladium computing still exists, we're still okay. Intel and Microsoft can leave that market if they wish, they most likely won't be missed anyway.
Remember, in Orwell's universe the government was unaccountable yet the the individual's every move was monitored and recorded. Maybe we actually want Palladium in our government's computers, because our system is based on the government's every move being accounted for and the individual only being monitored when there is a reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Hey, the man is good at doing his job. Most of Saddam's mouthpieces now say that they never liked the man, but they were just doing their jobs of spreading the information his government wanted spread. Telling lies to the American media isn't exactly a war crime, in fact it's a very American thing to do... a lot of Americans lie in front of media cameras on a daily basis, they include lawyers and executives among others.
Re:Orwell's vision was true!
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're right. We're not a democracy. We're a representative republic for most issues. That is, we don't bother to ask every person in America about every issue, we instead democratically select representatives who gather in Washington, D.C. to debate almost everything. Some of the issues they talk about are huge, but most of the routine things just slip by without getting the public's attention.
We select our president in the same way. We say we're voting for the president, but what we're really doing is voting for which panel of people our state will send to the Electoral College. Those people were selected by the campaign of the person whose name appears on the ballot, so it's rather certain (and contractually required) that they're going to vote for the people they're expected to, but they still have to gather and count the votes just to make sure we're doing it right. This crazy system allows a candidate who got less of the popular vote than another to pull out an upset, but is there to assure that the winning candidate must have supporters spread into many states and not just a few... the difference between getting 51% of California's vote and 98% of California's vote is wiped off the scorecard.
As for the mainstream media reporting "what they want you to hear" news, it's actually "what you want to hear" news. People like to watch car chases, and most of them don't really understand what Alan Greenspan does anyway. The beautiful thing about America is that you're not limited to one official news provider. You've got ABC, CBS, NBC/MSNBC/CNBC, Fox News, and CNN/CNN Headline/CNNfn for mainstream news, but they're not the only options. Matt Drudge is free to post whatever he wants about stories that he thinks the media is ignoring. I highly recommend against you getting all of your news just from Slashdot, but if that's your wish nobody can stop you. The mainstream media just get their status because they are the sources that most of the people listen to... if more people came to Slashdot than watched Peter Jennings, then Slashdot would instantly become considered a mainstream media source. But they don't, the average person considers this place "too geeky" for them.
You know what, we even let you over-paranoid people post things on the Internet... so nobody's censoring you. Just don't take to to hard when you get modded -1 Troll.
There always needs to be a balance
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
With all of the products marketed as must-haves for proper security, nobody seems to remember that security and trust must co-exist for things to work.
Total security is rarely useful. Total security is locking the only keys to the safe inside the same safe. No robber will ever get in, the problem is, the people should have access can't get in either.
People get concerned whenever a backdoor is placed in a software package by a vendor, however, we all drive cars with security backdoors. If you lock your keys in the car, and you're locked out, you can call AAA. Their truck operators know how to unlock your door without the key from the outside, and they effectively break into your car for you to let you back at your keys. Of course, this back door is secured by the fact that you have to identify yourself as a paying AAA member before the driver is even dispatched, which leaves a nice clear paper trail that can be traced back if this service is ever abused by car thieves.
When assigning security settings on a company server, the idea of giving everybody the minimum security you need to is incorrect. The correct answer is to give them exactly the resources they need to get their job done. There are some things that should be sent up to a higher level for approval, things that a low-level employee just shouldn't be allowed to do. However, system designers have to be careful that the approval events are not time consuming and don't happen too often, otherwise the employee will spend more time seeking authorizations than doing their original job, and that often translates into a delay that customers feel as well.
The only way to have a 100% assurance that a system will never be hacked is to just not build it. Of course, that isn't too useful so that isn't usually an option. Once you give any user any access to the system, you're taking a risk. That even includes yourself, as you could either screw up or turn evil from the point of view of your employer someday. The more people you let in, the more risks you end up taking. You can't elimiante the risk, you can only put controls in to limit it.
In the end, the operators of a business have to decide how much risk tolerance they have with their investment. If they want no risk, they should pack their money up and put it in an FDIC-insured bank. No risk in that, but also very little reward. The company that trusts its employees, and finds that trust to be well-placed gets the highest rewards, but risks the penalties for the occasional mistaken trust mounting up.
It's all about the balance. Too little security is fatal, but too much security can kill a business as well...
from my recollections of Orwell it was never direct control but indirect conrol in incremental steps..
The technology never directly controled people, Big Brother controled the people. The problem was, Big Brother used technology in such a way to mask his/its own identity (It's never clear if Big Brother is one person or a group of people, or where the descisions are coming from.) while sending comands to the rest of the Party, and forbid Party members from having any contact with non-Party members.
Would the real ruse please stand up?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Somehow, I think this book is more about hacking hiding under the ruse of helping the disabled than the other way around like the review implies.
The fact is, blind people can't play video games very well and nothing's going to really be able to fix that. I'm not sure what kind of hardware hack is gonna fix that. The avenue of having an first person shooter that can be played having sound give away the locations of other players for those who can't see video is really more of a challenge to the software developers... an off the shelf technology like QSound should make such a game possible, but would it be particularly playable is still unknown.
There's no need to hack the X-Box to make an eye-movement control. Pay your license fees to Microsoft and you can make almost any kind of controller you want, plug right into the front of the box without a "true USB" mod needed. BTW, for those of you who don't know, quadriplegics can't do hardware mods anyway for some strange reason.
The legal contraversy around this book has to deal with the ongoing fight over reverse engineering information from being publsihed. There's nothing contraversial about helping the disabled, and there's no stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. The DMCA doesn't talk about handicapped people at all, but it has a lot to say about reverse engineering...
The book is called Hacking the XBox, not Helping Disabled People Use the XBox.
Wired had a story in the pre-war buildup about how few Mac's are to be found in an Army field operations. The Army picks one standard and goes with it...
Those things exist, but still there is a legal limit of 1 Watt of effective power (meaning measured in the strongest direction, even if the original transmitter is getting less juice) for anything operating in the 2.8GHz band be it a wireless phone or a WiFi device. Anything more is a violation of the part 15 FCC rules.
Most consumer devices are well under that limit, putting out 1/10 to 1/5 of a Watt of transmitting power, so some performance gain is possible... but there's a big difference between setting up a WiFi network that covers a corperate campus, and setting up a "works everywhere" WiFi network that beams all over a metro area. You'd need a trasmitter on practically every lightpost to make that work, and that's just about as expensive of getting a cellular license and doing it the right way.
That will be the most likely use of a public WiFi, as a attraction to an area for the geeky. It would be nice for big-city parks to offer free WiFi stations (with conservatively-proxied and appropriately hacker-proof, small annoyances to prevent abuses) so that dad can see he has no e-mail and get back to playing with his kids. Local coffee shops might find that one way for them to undercut Starbucks would be to buy a $100 access point, configure it right, and then offer for free something the other guy is charging for...
Check today's other thread about the RIAA lawsuits... they're focusing on cutting off the uploaders, under the theory that success at that will leave the downloaders with nothing to download. Rather than trace the hit-n-run downloader, they'd rather disable the fixed point that the downloader is driving to.
If both the uploaders and downloaders are in constant motion, that's not gonna be a very stable network anyway.
That's because the biggest goal of porno advertising is just awareness and mindshare. The RIAA assumes that you know full well who Eminem is, now they want your money in exchange for his music.
Part of that is because the RIAA makes money when Eminem's recorded music gets sold, but has no interest in promoting him for any other purpose. Artists will tell you, the real money they make isn't from CDs, the CD and the radio airplay that hopefully comes with it are what allow them to fill mega-arenas for the big money concerts... look at the concert gig Celine Dion is working presently...
The recording industry is fighting to keep recordings as something worth paying for, because the world in which most recorded music is thought of as promotional material is a world in which the RIAA members don't exist anymore.
WiFi enables truly anonymous networking activity for the first time. Anonymity enables Free Speech and file sharing to an extent not yet imagined, and with little recourse for the RIAA and MPAA. They will run to the only recourse they have left: the outlawing of WiFi.
Nope, they've got another recource. enforcing copyright law and doing a little simple police work.
All the RIAA has to do is a little wardriving to find wide-open anonymous WiFi servers. Then, when they get onto one, they look through all the files available. If it's nothing but GPL software and old public domain movies, then all is fine and they move on... but if they find works still covered by copyright, then they've got a lucky winner. A little signal strength triangulation analysis will reveal from which building the signal is coming from and roughly where in the building there is.
Having proof a violation is happening, and a pretty good idea of where it's coming from is enough evidence to go get a search warrent. That gives the police the right to bust down your door, grab the offending equipment, document the fact that it was illegally offering copyrighted work for annonymous download, and the owner of the equipment gets dragged to court.
No need to outlaw WiFi, just a little enforcement of the laws already on the books will do the job.
WiFi isn't totally "free" spectrum either. Anybody has the right to set up a 900MHz, 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz device, but you have to keep your power levels within FCC limits. If you use a "pringles can" booster redirects the signal, and your end result sends to much power in any given direction, you're setup will be illegal. The limit is there because you'll be interfering with your neighbor's right to use that bandwidth too.
Some interference on these bands is to be expected and is considered to be fair play, but nobody's allowed dominate a "free" band in the same way that cellular providers are allowed and encuraged to do on their licensed bands. City-sized WiFi clouds would need far more sites than cell towers because of those limits, and that hopefully will always make the cost of such dominating networks so high that any attempt to make one always fails.
You can't trust such a network, because you can't trust the device that hears your request to play nicely. Mesh networking will quickly be taken over by the spammer-class scum who will return browser-trapping sites to any request they hear. Like it or not, you've gotta pay your bandwidth providers...
Slashdot Mirror
>>nor impairs its functioning
>I would argue that spam impairs my ability to use my computer
The computer displays Spam without a problem, you're the one that has a problem dealing with it. But the ruling didn't talk about you, it talked about the computer.
If they wanted to use their right to restrict his access, they could have bounced his e-mail or deleted it before employees read it. They didn't, so they forgot to use that right.
When you go out in public with your kids, you're taking a risk of somebody walking up and saying something you don't want them to hear. As a company connecting to the public Internet, they risk being sent e-mails they don't want to show their employees. If they want to shield from that, they may. But if they don't, that's their problem, nobody's gonna do it for them.
One other interesting thing... notice how Intel isn't bringing up a libel charge, which means they're quietly not bothering to claim that what he said in the disputed e-mail wasn't true?
Most computer parts are good for about 5 years tops... if everything was replaced in late 1999, what's gonna happen in 2004?
Verisign operating much of the Internet's infrastructure??? Please, spare me.
Unfortunately, to the non-techie Verisign's two services are critical to their use of the Internet. The non-techie can't navigate the Internet without DNS, and they're gonna walk away from any site with a self-issued SSL cert because of the scary browser warnings...
I think he's refering to the fact that by default www.google.com presents its interface in English, while www.google.de presents its interface in German and www.google.it presents its interface in Italian.
www.google.co.uk is another English interface, but unlike www.google.com it offers a mode to search only UK sites. It's likely presumed that English-speaking users use their own localized Google site rather than the USA site for better performance.
If you beleive that, then most terrorist attacks would be unpreventable. Afterall in a thwarted terror attack, they were just planning to _____________. They got all the stuff and wrote out exactly how they were gonna do it, but they didn't do it yet.
Conspiracy to committ a crime is a crime, and we'd be rather stupid to erase that law off the books.
It's well-placed in the show, in that it's the name of the clock used to time Fear Factor-ish stunts. NetZero's logo then appears at that point and remains on the screen next to the clock. The show also features the Circuit City Big Screen used for all visual games...
It's kind of like how on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Regis always asked AT&T to connect the contestant with their Phone-A-Friend friend and AT&T stays up for the duration of the call.
What this also tells the advertisers is that 30 seconds of no-content sales pitches don't work, but nobody's going to fast forward when Brooke Burns calls the clock on Dog Eat Dog the "NetZero Countdown Timer".
Keep it small and unintrusive and we'll put up with you, sponsors.
TiVo's doing this the right way. They're not telling the ad execs who skipped their ad, they're telling the ad execs how many people skipped their ad... 80% of the people watching the show you sponsored over a TiVo think your ad wasn't worth their time.
In contrast, TiVo points out that there almost always are several ads that air during the Super Bowl that actually get people to rewind back to them to see the ad again... wow, an ad that's so good people actually want to see it, what a concept!
TiVo's good at brokering this kind of compromise between the industry and end users, as opposed to Microsoft whose DVR errored in being too pro-industry and ReplayTV whose DVR errored in being too anti-industry. TiVo seems to be able to come up with a product that both expands user's abilities and keeps the industry lawyers away...
Maine and Nebraska are the only two states to NOT play by the winner take all rules. All of the other 48 do.
Palladium's intent is to create a system where information is trapped within the system, and any transfer of that infomation is properly documented. It's a great thing in a goverment situations where an accurate audit trail is something some people are always trying to get while others are trying to destroy it. (We can't comment on how well Palladium works because it's not done being made...)
Of course, Palladium is the enemy of anybody who calls non-accountabilty by it's more positve name, anonymity. Nothing's anonymous in Palladium's world, which pretty much indicates that there are some people who don't want to go anywhere near Palladium. As long as Palladium isn't forced on anybody, we're still okay, and there's been no talk of that.
Somehow, I think AMD and nVidia will always choose to offer non-Palladium hardware, and Linux will always be there. As long as non-Palladium computing still exists, we're still okay. Intel and Microsoft can leave that market if they wish, they most likely won't be missed anyway.
Remember, in Orwell's universe the government was unaccountable yet the the individual's every move was monitored and recorded. Maybe we actually want Palladium in our government's computers, because our system is based on the government's every move being accounted for and the individual only being monitored when there is a reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Hey, the man is good at doing his job. Most of Saddam's mouthpieces now say that they never liked the man, but they were just doing their jobs of spreading the information his government wanted spread. Telling lies to the American media isn't exactly a war crime, in fact it's a very American thing to do... a lot of Americans lie in front of media cameras on a daily basis, they include lawyers and executives among others.
You're right. We're not a democracy. We're a representative republic for most issues. That is, we don't bother to ask every person in America about every issue, we instead democratically select representatives who gather in Washington, D.C. to debate almost everything. Some of the issues they talk about are huge, but most of the routine things just slip by without getting the public's attention.
We select our president in the same way. We say we're voting for the president, but what we're really doing is voting for which panel of people our state will send to the Electoral College. Those people were selected by the campaign of the person whose name appears on the ballot, so it's rather certain (and contractually required) that they're going to vote for the people they're expected to, but they still have to gather and count the votes just to make sure we're doing it right. This crazy system allows a candidate who got less of the popular vote than another to pull out an upset, but is there to assure that the winning candidate must have supporters spread into many states and not just a few... the difference between getting 51% of California's vote and 98% of California's vote is wiped off the scorecard.
As for the mainstream media reporting "what they want you to hear" news, it's actually "what you want to hear" news. People like to watch car chases, and most of them don't really understand what Alan Greenspan does anyway. The beautiful thing about America is that you're not limited to one official news provider. You've got ABC, CBS, NBC/MSNBC/CNBC, Fox News, and CNN/CNN Headline/CNNfn for mainstream news, but they're not the only options. Matt Drudge is free to post whatever he wants about stories that he thinks the media is ignoring. I highly recommend against you getting all of your news just from Slashdot, but if that's your wish nobody can stop you. The mainstream media just get their status because they are the sources that most of the people listen to... if more people came to Slashdot than watched Peter Jennings, then Slashdot would instantly become considered a mainstream media source. But they don't, the average person considers this place "too geeky" for them.
You know what, we even let you over-paranoid people post things on the Internet... so nobody's censoring you. Just don't take to to hard when you get modded -1 Troll.
With all of the products marketed as must-haves for proper security, nobody seems to remember that security and trust must co-exist for things to work.
Total security is rarely useful. Total security is locking the only keys to the safe inside the same safe. No robber will ever get in, the problem is, the people should have access can't get in either.
People get concerned whenever a backdoor is placed in a software package by a vendor, however, we all drive cars with security backdoors. If you lock your keys in the car, and you're locked out, you can call AAA. Their truck operators know how to unlock your door without the key from the outside, and they effectively break into your car for you to let you back at your keys. Of course, this back door is secured by the fact that you have to identify yourself as a paying AAA member before the driver is even dispatched, which leaves a nice clear paper trail that can be traced back if this service is ever abused by car thieves.
When assigning security settings on a company server, the idea of giving everybody the minimum security you need to is incorrect. The correct answer is to give them exactly the resources they need to get their job done. There are some things that should be sent up to a higher level for approval, things that a low-level employee just shouldn't be allowed to do. However, system designers have to be careful that the approval events are not time consuming and don't happen too often, otherwise the employee will spend more time seeking authorizations than doing their original job, and that often translates into a delay that customers feel as well.
The only way to have a 100% assurance that a system will never be hacked is to just not build it. Of course, that isn't too useful so that isn't usually an option. Once you give any user any access to the system, you're taking a risk. That even includes yourself, as you could either screw up or turn evil from the point of view of your employer someday. The more people you let in, the more risks you end up taking. You can't elimiante the risk, you can only put controls in to limit it.
In the end, the operators of a business have to decide how much risk tolerance they have with their investment. If they want no risk, they should pack their money up and put it in an FDIC-insured bank. No risk in that, but also very little reward. The company that trusts its employees, and finds that trust to be well-placed gets the highest rewards, but risks the penalties for the occasional mistaken trust mounting up.
It's all about the balance. Too little security is fatal, but too much security can kill a business as well...
from my recollections of Orwell it was never direct control but indirect conrol in incremental steps..
The technology never directly controled people, Big Brother controled the people. The problem was, Big Brother used technology in such a way to mask his/its own identity (It's never clear if Big Brother is one person or a group of people, or where the descisions are coming from.) while sending comands to the rest of the Party, and forbid Party members from having any contact with non-Party members.
Somehow, I think this book is more about hacking hiding under the ruse of helping the disabled than the other way around like the review implies.
The fact is, blind people can't play video games very well and nothing's going to really be able to fix that. I'm not sure what kind of hardware hack is gonna fix that. The avenue of having an first person shooter that can be played having sound give away the locations of other players for those who can't see video is really more of a challenge to the software developers... an off the shelf technology like QSound should make such a game possible, but would it be particularly playable is still unknown.
There's no need to hack the X-Box to make an eye-movement control. Pay your license fees to Microsoft and you can make almost any kind of controller you want, plug right into the front of the box without a "true USB" mod needed. BTW, for those of you who don't know, quadriplegics can't do hardware mods anyway for some strange reason.
The legal contraversy around this book has to deal with the ongoing fight over reverse engineering information from being publsihed. There's nothing contraversial about helping the disabled, and there's no stiff legal penalties for helping handicapped people use computers. The DMCA doesn't talk about handicapped people at all, but it has a lot to say about reverse engineering...
The book is called Hacking the XBox, not Helping Disabled People Use the XBox.
Wired had a story in the pre-war buildup about how few Mac's are to be found in an Army field operations. The Army picks one standard and goes with it...
Has anybody thought how complicated it'd be if Microsoft wanted to to audit the Army's compliance?
Those things exist, but still there is a legal limit of 1 Watt of effective power (meaning measured in the strongest direction, even if the original transmitter is getting less juice) for anything operating in the 2.8GHz band be it a wireless phone or a WiFi device. Anything more is a violation of the part 15 FCC rules.
Most consumer devices are well under that limit, putting out 1/10 to 1/5 of a Watt of transmitting power, so some performance gain is possible... but there's a big difference between setting up a WiFi network that covers a corperate campus, and setting up a "works everywhere" WiFi network that beams all over a metro area. You'd need a trasmitter on practically every lightpost to make that work, and that's just about as expensive of getting a cellular license and doing it the right way.
That will be the most likely use of a public WiFi, as a attraction to an area for the geeky. It would be nice for big-city parks to offer free WiFi stations (with conservatively-proxied and appropriately hacker-proof, small annoyances to prevent abuses) so that dad can see he has no e-mail and get back to playing with his kids. Local coffee shops might find that one way for them to undercut Starbucks would be to buy a $100 access point, configure it right, and then offer for free something the other guy is charging for...
Check today's other thread about the RIAA lawsuits... they're focusing on cutting off the uploaders, under the theory that success at that will leave the downloaders with nothing to download. Rather than trace the hit-n-run downloader, they'd rather disable the fixed point that the downloader is driving to.
If both the uploaders and downloaders are in constant motion, that's not gonna be a very stable network anyway.
That's because the biggest goal of porno advertising is just awareness and mindshare. The RIAA assumes that you know full well who Eminem is, now they want your money in exchange for his music.
Part of that is because the RIAA makes money when Eminem's recorded music gets sold, but has no interest in promoting him for any other purpose. Artists will tell you, the real money they make isn't from CDs, the CD and the radio airplay that hopefully comes with it are what allow them to fill mega-arenas for the big money concerts... look at the concert gig Celine Dion is working presently...
The recording industry is fighting to keep recordings as something worth paying for, because the world in which most recorded music is thought of as promotional material is a world in which the RIAA members don't exist anymore.
WiFi enables truly anonymous networking activity for the first time. Anonymity enables Free Speech and file sharing to an extent not yet imagined, and with little recourse for the RIAA and MPAA. They will run to the only recourse they have left: the outlawing of WiFi.
Nope, they've got another recource. enforcing copyright law and doing a little simple police work.
All the RIAA has to do is a little wardriving to find wide-open anonymous WiFi servers. Then, when they get onto one, they look through all the files available. If it's nothing but GPL software and old public domain movies, then all is fine and they move on... but if they find works still covered by copyright, then they've got a lucky winner. A little signal strength triangulation analysis will reveal from which building the signal is coming from and roughly where in the building there is.
Having proof a violation is happening, and a pretty good idea of where it's coming from is enough evidence to go get a search warrent. That gives the police the right to bust down your door, grab the offending equipment, document the fact that it was illegally offering copyrighted work for annonymous download, and the owner of the equipment gets dragged to court.
No need to outlaw WiFi, just a little enforcement of the laws already on the books will do the job.
WiFi isn't totally "free" spectrum either. Anybody has the right to set up a 900MHz, 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz device, but you have to keep your power levels within FCC limits. If you use a "pringles can" booster redirects the signal, and your end result sends to much power in any given direction, you're setup will be illegal. The limit is there because you'll be interfering with your neighbor's right to use that bandwidth too. Some interference on these bands is to be expected and is considered to be fair play, but nobody's allowed dominate a "free" band in the same way that cellular providers are allowed and encuraged to do on their licensed bands. City-sized WiFi clouds would need far more sites than cell towers because of those limits, and that hopefully will always make the cost of such dominating networks so high that any attempt to make one always fails.
Mesh networks are a joke.
You can't trust such a network, because you can't trust the device that hears your request to play nicely. Mesh networking will quickly be taken over by the spammer-class scum who will return browser-trapping sites to any request they hear. Like it or not, you've gotta pay your bandwidth providers...