[HamWAN PSDR] Holy smokes, we have Internet address space!

[Bart Kus]

Hello, "The Doctor"!  Do you have a The Name? :)  I do remember reading 
about Byzantium when I was doing initial research for HamWAN, so welcome 
to the mailing list!

You make an interesting, but scary point about laws banning public 
networks.  I'm not so much worried about ISP policies; ISPs can be 
changed.  I've surfed through the link you provided and while it makes 
claims that laws have been passed, I can't seem to find any direct link 
to state legislature legal websites which publish the ratified laws.

Worryingly, it seems Washington state is affected.  Are you able to find 
anything official on the books for WA you can point us to?

The short blurb of laws cited at the top of this page 
<http://www.cybertelecom.org/states/wa.htm> only seems to require that 
any public network give explicit authorization to the general public for 
connections.  This seems like a reasonable policy and should not kill 
intentional public networks.  In our case, we're not an open public 
network, and do require user registrations.  Since we're using spectrum 
reserved for hams, we just have to make sure each user is a ham.  It's 
not hard to become a ham, either.  So we're just 1 step removed from 
being fully open to the general public.  :)

The laws on the main page look to be concerned with local GOVERNMENTS 
offering free networks and stomping out free enterprise competition.  
This also seems reasonable to me.  I'd rather get my free WiFi from an 
NPO than a government.  Let the government donate to an NPO if they want 
to setup such things in their community.

Let the berating of my opinions begin! :)

--Bart



On 02/22/2013 02:20 PM, Benjamin Krueger wrote:
> Lets be super clear here. We're not building a general use ISP. It's 
> an experimental open network. We'll provide the best integrity 
> controls we can, but there are no promises and every participant 
> should know exactly what they're getting in to.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 2:12 PM, The Doctor <drwho at virtadpt.net 
> <mailto:drwho at virtadpt.net>> wrote:
>
>     -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>     Hash: SHA1
>
>     On 02/21/2013 05:05 PM, Benjamin Krueger wrote:
>     > We really need to think long and hard about whether it's a good
>     > idea to connect this network to the internet. I am still
>     > unconvinced of the value of this proposition, and it causes a great
>     > many extremely difficult technical and legal challenges.
>
>     In the US, unless the account you have with a broadband ISP
>     specifically permits connection sharing (especially public connection
>     sharing), they may threaten to kill your access unless you take the
>     gateway to the mesh network down.  They may also decide to drop you as
>     a customer entirely and be done with you.
>
>     Additionally, there are several states that have laws against doing
>     just this.  Community wireless networks run into this problem a lot
>     and not a few have been shut down here.  It was a common complaint
>     from USian projects at the last International Summit for Community
>     Wireless Networks (this link was referenced a lot during the "State of
>     wireless" roundtable discussion:
>     http://www.cybertelecom.org/broadband/muni.htm).
>
>     > If nothing else, it is a distraction for us today. If we really
>     > want to explore that feature of the network, we should do it in a
>     > future phase after the network is already established. In the
>     > meantime, we can block
>
>     That would be a good strategy.  In addition, you will want to have a
>     large community of active users to help you make a case for not being
>     shut down if it comes to it.
>
>     > traditionally encrypted ports on the network as standard practice;
>     > no need for one-off changes from end-users.
>
>     The problem there is that you will then be forcing users to connect to
>     online services insecurely.  Passive attackers will be able to easily
>     record authentication credentials to webmail services (which are
>     increasingly being used as authentication providers by other services
>     - - Google Mail comes to mind immediately), banks, and other sites.
>
>     You might be incurring additional liability if you set that policy.
>     You might also want to reconsider setting up network gateways for this
>     reason.
>
>     - --
>     The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS]
>     Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/
>
>     PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F  DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1
>     WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
>
>     "I'm prophetic, not infallible." --Mr. Morden
>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> Benjamin
>
>
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