michiexile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
michiexile) wrote2005-07-06 10:25 am
michiexile) wrote2005-07-06 10:25 am
Entry tags:
The fallacy of property
Today on /. news about wardriving being brought to trial was reported. In general, it's actually a quite agreeable thing happening - unintentionally insecure hotspots and access points definitely can help criminal activity by working as an anonymizer. The trails will lead to the owner of the access point, but not necessarily further.
However, embedded in the article, a few comments arrive about connection sharing. Including the following quote:
This, my dear friends, is one of the more pungent parts of the war tactics employed by BSA, RIAA, MPAA. By labeling piracy as theft, and indicating loss of profit as the commodity being stolen, the debate opens up for the same argument to be used by almost anyone. The argument given by Lewis falls not very short of claiming that a new internet connection should be acquired for each network card using it. Imagine your ISP telling you that you no longer are allowed to NAT to enable internet access for your family members in addition to yourself. Imagine your ISP telling you that your laptop and your desktop are not allowed to run on the same connection, and billing you twice for double the amount of MAC adresses.
Unthinkable, you say?
Unethical, you say?
When BSA & *AA started pushing hard, I didn't think their arguments would be taken up by other industries either. Or rather, I hoped they wouldn't. There even is some validity to claiming that excessive copying of licensed data should be curbed in order to guarantee some sort of profit for the originator of the data - the extent of this is in much need of the ongoing debate. But Lewis claims that a service rendered may not be shared - more specifically, she explicitly requests the ability to control exactly who uses the rented data transfer line.
Seriously. Get your dirty ISP fingers the f**k out of my NAT, my router, my at home WiFi, my selected neighbours with connection sharing.
Just as seriously. Get your bloody routers shipped with MAC filtering. If you WANT to open up, you should have to work for it. The normal way SHOULD be to individually grant access to those you want to share your wireless connection with, not the other way around.
The only way to get the private connections halfway secure is to ship GOOD default settings. Holding people liable for connection sharing due to some sort of flawed lost-profits argument is NOT a way to this end.
However, embedded in the article, a few comments arrive about connection sharing. Including the following quote:
"It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft," said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando. "Just because a crime may be undetectable doesn't make it right."
This, my dear friends, is one of the more pungent parts of the war tactics employed by BSA, RIAA, MPAA. By labeling piracy as theft, and indicating loss of profit as the commodity being stolen, the debate opens up for the same argument to be used by almost anyone. The argument given by Lewis falls not very short of claiming that a new internet connection should be acquired for each network card using it. Imagine your ISP telling you that you no longer are allowed to NAT to enable internet access for your family members in addition to yourself. Imagine your ISP telling you that your laptop and your desktop are not allowed to run on the same connection, and billing you twice for double the amount of MAC adresses.
Unthinkable, you say?
Unethical, you say?
When BSA & *AA started pushing hard, I didn't think their arguments would be taken up by other industries either. Or rather, I hoped they wouldn't. There even is some validity to claiming that excessive copying of licensed data should be curbed in order to guarantee some sort of profit for the originator of the data - the extent of this is in much need of the ongoing debate. But Lewis claims that a service rendered may not be shared - more specifically, she explicitly requests the ability to control exactly who uses the rented data transfer line.
Seriously. Get your dirty ISP fingers the f**k out of my NAT, my router, my at home WiFi, my selected neighbours with connection sharing.
Just as seriously. Get your bloody routers shipped with MAC filtering. If you WANT to open up, you should have to work for it. The normal way SHOULD be to individually grant access to those you want to share your wireless connection with, not the other way around.
The only way to get the private connections halfway secure is to ship GOOD default settings. Holding people liable for connection sharing due to some sort of flawed lost-profits argument is NOT a way to this end.
no subject
no subject
The counter-argument is that most people who have a network connection home only use a percent or so of it. But maybe then the problem is that they cant get a slower connection cheaper (of course the bursty nature of network connections matter here, but I'll ignore that for simplicity) ...
no subject
When it comes to hired bandwidth, it's not a duplicatable commodity, but rather just like bread or fuel or what not a commodity that you can divide and thereby get less from. A significant problem is that people are uneducated enough not to know that they are sharing their limited resource, but that calls for good settings for hardware, and not contractual obligations not to share or other idiocies.
And yes, you basically gave a decent boildown of my rant.