Kid Convicted for Using Open WiFi in Singapore

by Rachel Lim Sun Mar 25, 10:35 PM ET

"SINGAPORE (AFP) - When 17-year-old Garyl Tan Jia Luo piggybacked on his neighbour's unsecured wireless Internet network to chat online, he could not have imagined that in doing so he would make Asian legal history.

Information technology (IT) experts and lawyers say Tan was the first in Singapore, and possibly Asia, to be sentenced in court for "wireless mooching," or piggybacking on an unsecured wireless network to surf the Internet.

A judge in the city-state's district court sentenced him to 18 months' probation in January."

The article also mentions how home networks are more open to abuse because they aren't set up right for security.

Of course, if they are set up in the Wireless Nomad way, nobody is locked out, and nobody is being used unfairly... and nobody ends up with a criminal conviction for using somebody else's extra bandwidth.



LINK

Excess bandwidth fees with Bell Canada DSL

I found this on Alan Gahtan's blog: looks like Bell DSL has a download cap... I thought this was a thing of the past!


From the Blog of Alan Gahtan
January 1, 2007
Excess bandwidth fees - Bell Canada


"I’ve noticed that Bell Canada has recently lowered its bandwidth caps on some of its high speed internet plans. I’m not sure when this happened but do recall that the higher end plans, which now have bandwidth caps of 30 GB per month, were up at around 100 GB last time I looked (perhaps a year ago?). Bell does state that the cap “applies to new clients without a term agreement; $1.00/additional GB, rounded up to the next GB of up to $30/month”. So they may have grandfathered existing customers, or at least the ones that had signed up for a term plan. See this chart to compare the various plans offered. While this seems like a high limit, it would not be hard to reach it for households who use IPTV services or who have kids running bit torrent."


LINK

Lawrence Lessig on Net Netrality and WiFi groups

From Lessig's article "I Blew It on Microsoft" in Wired 15.01:

"I think about this mistake whenever I think about the current Microsoft-like network-neutrality debate – whether network owners can pick the stuff that flows across "their" network. In this debate, too, I am a reluctant regulator. And again, I don't see how it's possible to steer broadband providers away from a business model that – like Microsoft's – may benefit them but could stifle innovation. Every dominant commercial competitor has the same incentive: to build a business that extracts all potential value from the pipes that company owns.

But life is all about repeating the same mistakes in many different contexts. So, are we reluctant regulators wrong again? Is there something we think is impossible today that will be obvious tomorrow? Can last-mile broadband be developed in a way that doesn't rely on the incentives that drive current providers toward innovation-stifling business models?

Yes. There isn't yet a Linus Torvalds of broadband, nor is a single competitive platform being built by volunteers to displace AT&T. But there are forces mucking up the game for those who would profit most from last-mile control.

The core of this resistance comes from municipalities. Local governments are building neutral infrastructures that allow anyone, from ISPs to community networks, to use and extend blisteringly fast broadband networks. At the end of its first year, a project in Sandoval County, New Mexico, for example, already provides many in the area with more than 10 times the capacity than anywhere else in the US.

And municipal networks are just a first step. Many Linux-style volunteers are building free wireless networks that enable participants to share access and offer capacity to others. These volunteers are also building free protocols that enable legal access without shifting control to a last-mile access provider.

These activists recognize the basic truth of what I call the McAdams theorem: Monopolists, as Cornell economist Alan McAdams puts it, don't monopolize themselves. If the monopoly-like asset is owned by the user, he has little incentive to exploit himself. Put differently, private ownership by users creates its own business model.

Will these grassroots alternatives check the power of the big companies? I remain skeptical. But the frantic efforts of traditional broadband providers to persuade states to ban municipal broadband should give you some clue as to the potential of these services."


LINK to Lessig article

Another Reason to be Your Own ISP

From "Your ISP may be selling your web clicks"
By Jeremy Reimer | Published: March 15, 2007 - 07:56PM CT:

"David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete Incorporated, raised eyebrows at the Open Data 2007 Conference in New York when he revealed that many Internet service providers sell the clickstream data of their users. Clickstream data includes every web site visited by each user and in which order they were clicked."


Unreal-- ISPs are getting as bad as the credit card companies that sell your transaction history data to marketers. There's something to be said for the DIY ISP... we can chose not to be part of these schemes.


Link to Story at ArsTechnica

Digital Inclusion resource page on MuniWireless

Esme Vos has a great resource page on "digital inclusion", all about WiFi projects working to bridge the digital divide.


LINK

Study: Net neutrality law would spur infrastructure improvements

From Eric Bangeman at Ars:

"One of the main arguments opponents of network neutrality make is that laws requiring ISPs to treat all traffic equally would discourage infrastructure investment on the part of those who own the pipes. A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida undercuts those claims."<

So... finally, someone has shown that competition in the telecom market can stimulate innovation and investment. Hardly a novel idea... but a really good point to make as the net neutrality debate rages and we try to keep the net open to users and innovators.

LINK to Ars

Certificate Warning on WN WiFi Website

A temporary certificate problem, no security breaches or anything like that. Steve and Ron will update it this weekend. For now, just click CONTINUE, no worries.

Monthly Meeting March 14

What?
March Monthly Meeting

When?
Wednesday, Mar 14, 2007, 7:00 PM

Where?
Linux Caffe
326 Harbord Street
Toronto, ON M6G 3A4
416-534-2116


See you there!

Letter from Dallas Muniwireless

Robert Ramsay is grad student at U of T and a great guy I met last year at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara.

He is visiting the MuniWireless conference that's on in Dallas this week, and is reporting back to everyone stuck here in icy Toronto. City-wide WiFi is really big in the US, partly because of the lack of competition for home internet access-- nothing like the Wireless Nomad project is possible in the US since the laws were changed a couple of years ago. Anyway, enough intro: here's Robert!

------------------------------------
March 6, 2007, Dallas, Texas
Robert Ramsay

These conferences aren't the same without Wireless Nomad in attendance, for two reasons. One, small community networks are always underrepresented. Two, there's no one here to point out the insularity of the muni wi-fi movement, specifically that the obstacles faced by American municipalities (and the muni-corporate hybrid entities that are increasingly the norm) are highly contextual and contingent. As American initiatives move slowly forward, haunted always by the spectre of decreasing global competitiveness, cities in other parts of the world speed ahead, unencumbered by the kinds of concerns that impede progress in the States. As Esme Vos eloquently pointed out in her keynote yesterday, in a country where cities often find plenty of money and support for 200 million dollar sports arenas, that a 20 million dollar city-wide wireless broadband network is considered an impractical expense confuses and confounds.

I can report on two significant trends in muniwireless that are reaching maturity in the conference rooms here in Dallas. First, while the kinds of cities that are planning networks and the reasons they are planning them are becoming more diverse, the business plans are becoming less so. The sun seems to have set on the original Philadephia model, which envisioned a publicly owned network anchored by free areas. Now, public-private partnerships are the name of the game, and striking the most beneficial one is the goal. An interesting residual of the Philly model remains, though -- the idea of "free". However, whereas "free" used to refer to the cost of the network to the user, now "free" refers to the cost to the city. More and more RFPs ask for vendor-financed networks -- economic development without cost, akin to what geographer Jamie Peck has described as an urban cargo cult. Get someone else to build it, and they (businesses, knowledge workers, tourists, wealthy residents, corporate HQs, etc.) will come.

The second theme is community benefits. Again, Philly played a role here, establishing an expectation that a municipal network provide positive externalities for the residents, at all socio-economic scales. A concern for digital inclusion remains, but it has become more sophisticated. Access and connectivity are not enough, of course, and must be accompanied by the hardware, software, and wetware that make access and connectivity valuable. Similarly, those who already have access but are impeded by throttled broadband capacity may find themselves on the wrong side of another digital divide. Hence, Karen Archer Perry spoke of the sliding scale of digital inclusion: for those who have no access, that is obviously the place to start; for those who have access but do not have the speed and capacity to operate the applications they need to perform their work (or leisure), increased upload/download limits and higher capacities are the way forward. The duopoly system in the States is unprepared to address this problem currently, as the telcos have no incentives to increase access and capacity at the rate it is growing in Europe. Vos, again, pushed for a wholesale model, where the telco provides the network for a competitive ISP market wholesale. If a user finds that one ISP is providing access selectively, that user can change to another competitively priced ISP on the same network. This would also, incidentally, render irrelevant the network neutrality debate.

At events like this, it is often difficult to distinguish what is thoughtful discussion and what is a sales pitch, but there are some visionaries, like Vos and Perry, who can be counted on to push the limits of what is considered possible in muni wi-fi. Let's hope they aren't silenced by a lucrative contract to design the next top-down metropolitan network or something.