Okay. You know what? There are both interesting and convincing arguments for and against bandwidth "sharing" from open APs that did not give explicit permission to share. We can argue until our fingers are black and blue from typing and until our email accounts are stuffed with these discussions and absolutely nothing will come of it.
Why don't we take a more practical approach towards this matter instead of arguing back and forth? What we can do is that we can start cataloging open APs we run into in the NYC area and move them into a 3-tiered list...A "yellow" list will be a listing of all unsecured, open APs we run across that did not list explicit permission for usage. Upon detection we can immediately try and find the owner of the open AP (should not be too hard, I think) and email them a standard "Your AP is open...We are unsure of whether you are aware of the legal implications of having this open and we should inform you of the risks of running it insecure" letter which urges them to either secure it or to open it. We can also make this "yellow" listing available and open to the public but with a stern warning that certain individuals might consider this as trespass of their property and may take potential legal action against anyone who uses it. This can serve as a valuable lookup tool for those who are ethically opposed to using something without asking. You as a user might be able to get away with using their bandwidth, or you can be playing legal Russian Roulette with some high-powered Manhattan IP lawyer who just happens to have an inadvertently open AP and might have some free time to sue your ass off. As the AP operator your options would be to either email us to ask us to move you into the green list (Sharing okay, welcome neighbor!) or the red list (Git off my propertah, vermit!). If you sit on the email for more than 4 weeks or so, you get moved to the red list by default. A "green" list would be used to denote all APs which have given their explicit permission to allow bandwidth sharing and includes all current nycwireless nodes. Bandwidth sharing is allowable as far as the user and the provider is concerned but availability is not guaranteed. Just respect your bandwidth host and don't do anything stupid, like using BitTorrent to grab Matrix: Reloaded off their bandwidth. A "Red" list will be used to denote nodes with owners who were sent this letter and either sent us an explicit response to not share or have chosen not to respond to our initial letter of warning/concern/neighborly advice in a timely manner. Anyone who choose to use these nodes are on their own. If they got sued for using bandwidth without permission or accused of kooky allegations like sniffing packets/passwords off the host, well, we warned them. I think this setup would address the needs of both sides. The side which is ethically bound to ask-before-share would know that all open nodes are reported to their owners and they can be taken off the list in a split second should they need to be. The side which advocates unregulated bandwidth sharing even without explicit permission will know that what they are doing also carries some legal responsibilities and risks. -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
