Free WiFI at Panera Bread on Amherst St, Nashua

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 08:39:23AM -0400, Travis Roy wrote:
> Well there are two ways they could deal with it.. I think a stupid 
> little click box is worthless, so in reality it's basically open. If you 
> have an open network with no accounts then I would assume that it would 
> be the shop keeper that is responsible. It's their network, they opened 
> it up to the world, they're the ones not keeping track of who's on it.

I haven't actually been to an Internet cafe in the west, but here in
Korea if you go to one of the thousands of PC 방 on any street corner,
you don't need to provide any information.  Is this different at
hard-wired cafes States-side?  If it isn't, then there's no
difference.  There's no accountability.  And personally, malware and
other attacks notwithstanding, I think that's a good thing.  Anonimity
and privacy are nice.  :)

Sure, you can make the argument that this helps the bad guys... but it
doesn't matter.  With our without Internet cafes, they will get acess
to whatever they want to...  The only solution to the problem of
viruses and system attacks is for vendors to start shipping
"secure-by-default" products, and for the common Joe to take the
responsibility to understand and protect his systems.

In other words, it will never happen.

> The other way would be to require a user account to login. You put
> in all your information and you log their mac, IP, login time and
> logout time. Sure, somebody could put bogus info, but at least the
> shop keeper can say "here's when that person logged in, logged out,
> their IP, Mac address, and all the info they put in when they signed
> up for the account"

What does that solve?  If someone goes to an internet cafe with the
intention of doing ill, assuming they're not complete imbeciles, they
will obviously provide false information.  They'll also probably
change their MAC address.  That leaves you with nothing of value.
Except, perhaps, a visual of the perp, if there happen to be security
tapes from that time available...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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