Fair start, but maybe not a complete solution? Imagine a car equipped with Wi-Fi, driving around town, and the car (not the driver) "wants" to connect to public access points whenever it can. The car needs an unambiguous, simple, mechanical way to determine if the access point is public. If you'd said just SSID="public" that might be OK. We might also need a general agreement that the factory default should never be SSID="public". So "public" and absence of encryption/authentication would express intent on the part of the access point owner/operator. I wonder if that would make sense to a court?
This is the common sense position, for sure. But there is that nagging question about TOS on the Internet service. Aren't there really two problems here? One is the conflict between ISP TOSs (which are real) and the default setting of access points (most users just plug it in, they won't even know this could lead to a violation of the TOS). The other problem is the lack of legal precedents establishing the bounds of liability. The arguments about legal reception of signals don't apply to this case, because a wireless device is receiving *and* transmitting. It's the transmitting part that is the heart of the matter. A transmission is an expression of intent.
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Fair start, but maybe not a complete solution? Imagine a car equipped with Wi-Fi, driving around town, and the car (not the driver) "wants" to connect to public access points whenever it can. The car needs an unambiguous, simple, mechanical way to determine if the access point is public. If you'd said just SSID="public" that might be OK. We might also need a general agreement that the factory default should never be SSID="public". So "public" and absence of encryption/authentication would express intent on the part of the access point owner/operator. I wonder if that would make sense to a court?
This is the common sense position, for sure. But there is that nagging question about TOS on the Internet service. Aren't there really two problems here? One is the conflict between ISP TOSs (which are real) and the default setting of access points (most users just plug it in, they won't even know this could lead to a violation of the TOS). The other problem is the lack of legal precedents establishing the bounds of liability. The arguments about legal reception of signals don't apply to this case, because a wireless device is receiving *and* transmitting. It's the transmitting part that is the heart of the matter. A transmission is an expression of intent.