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Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 04, 2008 07:07 AM
from the well-not-in-so-many-words dept.
from the well-not-in-so-many-words dept.
A few days ago, Dan Rutter (the Dan in "Dan's Data") published an interesting idea for extending the sort of philanthropic technical pranksterism that spawned throwies by applying the same approach to Wi-Fi. That means, looking what he hopes is not too far down the road, creating Wi-Fi repeaters that are cheap enough to deploy on the sly and frugal enough with power to run on solar power or cheaply replaceable batteries. But as he says, "If you've got a lot of spare money, a ladder and no respect for private property, though, you could already be stealthily deploying Open-Mesh or other such gadgets all over your neighbourhood." In some cities at least, you'd be hard pressed to ever avoid at least one available wireless access point, but that's not the experience for most people, most places -- which bears correction.
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Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, what's to prevent somebody from stealing one of the boxes, and causing an outage... or modifying the firmware on one of these boxes to sniff for passwords?
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to make sure that the boxes are cheap and plentiful, so that stealing them is about as exciting as stealing a plastic bag from a supermarket.
If it's done right (e.g. using mesh networking technology), breaking just a few nodes should not cause an outage.
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
How much battery would be required to run something like a WRT54GL at reasonable latitudes assuming the only external power input is solar? I would think that the batteries and solar cells would be the more attractive things to steal, and if you can make them as cheap as plastic bags from a supermarket then you've solved a whole load more problems than community wireless
Parent
Power issues (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a very good point.
I don't think that using solar-powered devices is economically feasible; you really need access to external power.
In cities, there's power in every streetlamp, and we need to find ways to get the municipal authorities to give us access to that,
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
One would hope (yeah, I know...) that people on some kind of open mesh network might think to be a little more secure with their passwords, CC numbers, etc.
For some time, ISPs had clauses in contracts that only allowed a single computer to use a connection. With NAT so easy to implement, they relaxed that stipulation. But if subscribers start providing free internet to their neighbors, and especially if that network gets expanded as per suggestion, ISPs will probably start disconnecting users that abuse their policies.
And sure, people could figure out ways to spoof it, but if the technology is simple enough and the use gets widespread, ISPs will figure out how to detect these networks and get compensation for the misuse.
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Being an ISP is not anything that special. You just have to be willing to pay the costs, deal with the business aspects, deal with the legal aspects, and if you have employees, deal with income tax, unemployment tax, etc.
It's not like being an ISP is something willed or auctioned like season tickets or anything.
You can be an ISP, or even eliminate needing an ISP. All it takes is money.
You see, that is what ISPs provide - they handle all the business side of things and charge individual subscribers some reasonable amount for access through cable, DSL, digital cell access, etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I think ISPs will eventually be the answer to this problem, not an obstacle. Ultimately they stand to gain from distributing routers that share the service with passing users from any other ISP (peering agreements could make it universal). Eventually we'll all live in an inter-connected cloud, and perhaps eventually the role of ISPs will change to a utility or a public monopoly, but at present they're the best hope we have for instigating something like this.
You can already see this happening with initiatives like fon and wifi networks like The Cloud. Hopefully ISPs will wise up sooner rather than later to the massive income they could achieve by micro-billing everyone instead of trying to charge loads for fixed connections.
When I walk down the streets of the city I live in, there are no less than 10 wireless access points visible almost everywhere - we already have a mesh, it's just not connected yet.
Parent
It's a...! (Score:3, Funny)
I like it (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I like it (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Years back, "service" was intended for one computer. We got ourselves routers because it was quite silly that providers were charging on a per computer basis. It just didn't make sense. Yes, some bits were different, but it were still just that, bits. Story is still the same now.
Parent
Re:I like it (Score:5, Interesting)
So they go back to charging you by the megabyte. Full commercial rates for the five to fifteen households you are now servicing.
Parent
Re:I like it (Score:4, Insightful)
And it will happen because some people abuse their connections and allow others free use of service they are not paying to support. Another pressure to move to metered use is because of file sharing.
But both will cause a change in Internet contracts. Maybe some fixed price as long as users stay below some data level, but tiered pricing after that level based on data transferred. Or even a straight cost per megabyte.
Whenever something good comes along, there will always be those that look for how it can be exploited to their advantage. Eventually the holes will get closed by some kind of draconian measure and everybody will be the worse for it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or, if you like the empirical approach, run something that maxes out your connection and leave it running until you get a phone call/e-mail/cut off.
Re: (Score:2)
They could, but that would probably be a loss from them. Price per Gigabyte is rather low these days, the current pricing schemes actually benefit ISP's, since 80% of the people is paying for something they don't really use.
Full commercial rates for the five to fifteen households you are now servicing.
Why commercial rates? No-ones mention business use here. Second, just because people share stuff, doesn't mean some is servicing another. I don't even know what "servicing" means in this context?
Re: (Score:2)
We got routers so we could have multiple computers share a single internet pipe that was coming into our homes. It didn't matter if the ISP said something about only one connection=one computer. We definitely did not add the ability for all the computers in our home to get online at the same time, because something was silly.
But I agree with the sentiment in a few posts that if something like what
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Service is intended for one household only.
The ISP sells me bandwidth, not service for a household. Also, people don't use Wi-Fi as a substitute for cable. It's much too slow and inconvenient, and service is somewhat sporadic. People use Wi-Fi temporarily, such as when they are at a friend's house, or a coffee shop, or their home modem is malfunctioning. If someone wants and can afford high speed internet access in their home, they will pay for cable or DSL.
I live in a large apartment building, and share my cable service via Wi-Fi. It gets used,
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And a lot of people use WiFi permanently - not temporarily. It isn't so easy to retrofit most houses with ethernet.
What you are doing is rationalizing theft and misuse.
Read your contract. It's what you supposedly agreed to. If you now decide to do as you please, and steal bandwidth for your neighbors because it makes you some kind of hero,
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What about people who lease business SDSL and/or T1s?
It's NO DIFFERENT THAN COMMON CABLE THEFT. Oh, do you support stealing that, too?
So is Comcast/Timewarner stealing bandwidth of the websites you visit? Cable service is a one way street. Internet connections are not. It is not actually illegal to share your
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And it is OK for people to just decide that contracts they sign and agree to are no longer valid because???
It really is stealing, moron, and you know it. All you are doing is trying to justify it and find some way to appease what little conscience you might still have.
What is worse for your ISP is that you ar
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not ask your ISP if it is legal to "sublet" your connection and thereby deprive them of a revenue stream? Even if the people you provide service to would not buy it otherwise, is it OK to add the burden of extra bandwidth to your ISP when your ISP has to pay for that bandwidth on their own backbone connection? Who cares how many people use it or about your altruistic beliefs that you should be able to do it?
Call your ISP and ask them. If they say it's ok, the
Not all ISP's suck (Score:2, Informative)
They also encourage you to charge for it, but there's no reason why it can't be done for free if you'd like.
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/ [speakeasy.net]
It's a Billing Issue (Score:2, Interesting)
If ISPs charged per GB up and down, they'd quickly lose interest in people who shared with a neighbor. It would also discourage use of Sandvine [wikipedia.org] to disrupt file sharing (Linux distros only, of course) because throttling bandwidth would throttle their profits. The marginal cost of bandwidth (for a subscriber) is Zero, so consumption is unrestr
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Some ISPs have account types explicitly intended for sharing, like Speakeasy.
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ISPs (Score:2, Interesting)
I still wonder if it would be workable for an ISP to supply a router which gives the owner priority over the bandwidth but allows any subscriber to connect (only) to the internet.
For the consumer it's a mutual benefit, I make my bandwidth open to fellow customers and they do the same for me. The ISP wins from having a better service to attract customers, and also from wifi-only subscribers. The latter may also make for cost/price competitiveness, since you have more subscribers per physical connection.
Stealing & More (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like you can't steal cable or run a cable over to your neighbor's, you can't steal internet service either.
Likewise, when someone pirates something using your network, the person getting sued will probably be the person that pays the bill--you. And just think what would happen if someone downloads child pornography on your connection...!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
when you sign on for internet you agree it's for your household, apartment, or whatever, not for you to provide publicly
Not necessarily true, but even where it is they can, frankly, bite me. Since they sell unlimited bandwidth and then put in teeny small print to say, effectively "unlimited does not mean unlimited" I don't have much of a problem with ignoring their unnecessary restrictions. Remember, this is a breach of contract at worst.
My electricity and water suppliers are not able to put these restrictive terms into their contracts, I see no reason why I should respect the internet suppliers' attempts to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, I think ISP's can't advertise something like 'Unlimited', and then add conditions in small print. The conditions have to be as visible as the 'Unlimited' text, although i'm less certain about that one... it may have been a proposed law.
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Electricity and water, as far as I know, is usually not put on "unlimited" plans. You pay for every gallon and every kWhr consumed. You don't pay by the MB, GB or anything like that.
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It's not even an analogy. It's literally the pricing scheme adopted by the ISPs.
They charge "per person" with the expectation that the average person will take only so much. But that assumption goes all to heck if people start sub-letting their buffet plates.
If you wanted "all you (and everone you want to call 'friend') can eat," you should have bought that plan. Not the "all you can eat" plan, which assumes that you'll be the only one doing the eating.
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The same thing happens everytime there's an article here about free wifi.
It's a neat idea, and I hope people keep tinkering. However we also need to push the le
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because in your area the ISP are wankers does not mean they all are.
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X-Prise for this? (Score:2)
Isn't this, essentially, what FON already do? (Score:3, Informative)
The only additional item here seems to be not getting ISP permission to do what they are happy to give permission for anyway. Rebellion this isn't.
until someone loads questionable content (Score:3, Interesting)
Bleat all you like about "helping the community" or philanthropy or whatever you like. This is a naive attitude - similar to leaving your garage door open and then claiming "it's not mine" when stolen goods are found inside.
Anyway, if these devices are so cheap that you can afford to leave them out in the open (until they die, suddenly the firt time it rains), then your neighbours can afford to by one themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice, but inconsistent with ISP bandwidth capping (Score:2)
I installed a second wireless router upstairs to double the coverage in our flat, but only enabled WEP at the outset (yeh, I know); someone cracked the password and helped themselves to 6GB of download in one week.
Result? Virgin capped us down to dial up speeds for two weeks.
Nice one that, thanks for (ab)using my bandwidth.
So given that so
Re:"hardhack"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Like an old school BBS but on wireless and without the internet?
I don't know how feasible or useful it would be, but the thought of the geekdom recreating the BBS days without the rest of the commercial internet is tantalizing.
Personally, I'd be willing to buy a router that relays for this purpose only to extend the mesh but not a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We, in Paris [jussieu.fr], have been experimenting with just such a network, based on a dynamic mesh routing protocol (Babel [jussieu.fr]) and an autoconfiguration protocol similar to DHCP (AHCP [jussieu.fr]).
The results are mixed. On the one h
Re:Sounds good to me (Score:4, Insightful)
What everybody fails to grasp is this: if you're ever been merely accused of something the powers-that-be don't like (child pornography, "terrorist" materials, whatever) they're not going to listen to your plaintive cries of "but it's an open access point." They don't care as long as they can be publicly seen to be doing their jobs. Odds are the grunts arresting you won't know an access point from Adam, and they'll haul your ass off to jail as a matter of principle. Then, if you have a very good lawyer and are lucky enough to come before a tech-savvy judge (and don't count on that) you might have some form of viable defense. Then again, you might not, and could end up serving ten years to life. Either way, you've been seriously boned up the ass and for what? Giving your cheap-ass neighbor his jollies?
So, don't assume the cops or the Justice System will be reasonable about any of this, or even grasp the fundamental technical aspects of modern communications. They will take the simplest approach, which is it was your I.P. that was active when the offensive/illegal materials were downloaded, and even if it was someone else who did it it was still your equipment that was used. That wouldn't remotely constitute proof to an engineer, but so far lawyers have had a field day with it.
Bottom line, secure your access point as tightly as you can, and if you're going to download anything "questionable" do it through an encrypted anonymous service like Tor, and hope that that is sufficient to protect you. God help you if it's not, because nobody else will.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what country you live in, but it must be someplace whose legal system hasn't been pwned by a bloodsucking media conglomerate. That would not be the United States, by the way. The Recording Industry Association of America has been suing/threatening thousands of Internet users on just the kind of "evidence" I was talking about. And so far as governmental organizations are concerned, the FBI has taken the pos
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now you *could* use a very fancy antenna system, and combine a high-power dipole with an array (or virtual array using DSP) of highly directional antennas with overlapping coverage over the same area as your dipole.
But