Bill in UK may disallow public wi-fi | Hacker News Reader

Bill in UK may disallow public wi-fi

crunchgear.com

16 pointsalexandros12 comments

What happens if someone parks near my house, cracks my secured WiFi spot (easy with the right tools in the hands of a determined cracker), breaks the law, and drives off? Who's at fault here? I'm not offering a public service, and I am the internet subscriber receiving the nastygram.

Not good.

Only risk takers or the poorly informed would run public, untracked/unmonitored WiFi spots anyway. When the police come a-knocking because someone downloaded child porn over your connection, they're going to be taking all your computer equipment away as evidence whether they charge you or not - and that's not a reasonable risk most businesses should be taking.

Aside from the technological and legal issues, the availability of free wireless seems to reflect (perhaps even change) urban culture noticeably. I've stayed in major cities on three continents and the places with free wireless invariably had a more creative and lively vibe about them.

"I've stayed in major cities on three continents and the places with free wireless invariably had a more creative and lively vibe about them."

That might be the other way round, that creative, lively cities are more likely to have free, open wireless.

You're responding to someone who pointed out a correlation by suggesting it be replaced with a causation? "I've stayed in major cities on three continents and the places with free wireless invariably had a more creative and lively vibe about them" makes no assertions about which leads to the other.

Maybe. I've noticed that more creative, progressive cities have a lot of nice hotels, coffee shops and high end car dealerships, so we should look into building those things in destitute areas and third world countries to help improve their quality of life.

Attitudes like these greatly inflate the actual incidence rate of outright illegal abuse of internet services, most notably child porn. There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. (By contrast, there often IS a violent domestic abuser lurking on every block in US cities, yet nowhere the same magnitude of public shame campaign directed against them, despite the magnitude of their damage to society.)

Also, downloading copyrighted material generally amounts to a civil offense in the US, even though it is often conflated with more serious criminal behavior (aka child porn) by the MAFIAA.

The risks of running unsecured wifi can be easily communicated to its users, and likewise contained by promoting use of secondary encryption such as SSL.

To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes.

There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe.

Did I say there was? You wildly missed my point.

The point is not that it's common, but that it can happen at all. Someone may use a public connection to download illegal material and that, in today's touchy security environment, could easily lead to the cops hauling your computers away. Simple as that. No paranoia here. This is reality.

With a locked down private network, this unlikely event is made way more unlikely. Still, if your business wants to run that risk then, well, you're a "risk taker" by my definition.

A ridiculous comparison. If someone steals one of your company's van and does a drive by, the cops are hardly going to bust in and take out all your computers as evidence.

My post stands.

As does my post, although I'm disappointed in the distribution of karma points on both.

Since child porn predates both wifi and the web, wifi encryption is just a band-aid when it's advocated as a solution to distribution of illegal content. People determined to use the broadband connections of others to mask their usage need only google things like 'break wpa encryption' and find adequate means, and they have plenty of incentive to be determined. Which still leaves the unfortunate middle-man with the same scenario of having his computer confiscated, but only now with even less of an idea of how to avoid the same problem in the future.

Besides that, my bias is instilled from seeing coffeeshops and similar small businesses inevitably annoy paying customers because of snafus with wifi ecryption, e.g. an older mac laptop that doesn't understand WPA2. My opinion is that this does greater damage than the boogie-men of unsecured wifi will ever do.

To again invoke the analogy of car theft, where I live it's considered more sensible to leave your vehicle unlocked and nothing valuable in plain sight than to tint the windows.

For those of you living in la-la-the-law-is-fair-and-wonderful-land, what I suggested isn't a wacko edge case. Confiscations and legal ramifactions do occur through the use of open wifi systems:

Municipal wifi shut down for one illegal download: http://boingboing.net/2009/11/12/mpaa-shuts-down-enti.html

In Denmark: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/06/funny-story-about-co.ht...

In Germany: http://is.gd/9lQ2h

In the UK: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10405824-83.html

Guy in Texas got busted for child porn accessed over his open wifi point (albeit with a complication): http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/child-porn-c...

There are other problems you open yourself to as well.. http://www.inpropriapersona.com/2010/02/does-an-open-wifi-si...

Often cops confiscate or lay down "the law" first and ask questions later. Reducing the risk of that is a good thing.

You could just view it as one more natural disaster for your backup and recovery system to take care of.

Stupid. The people seeding DVDs and child porn all use IPreadator (or similar) now. The people in coffee shops just want to do work or read their email.

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