Michi's moat

Whaddaya know. The EU actually does make somethings halfways decent. The latest is the BEUC - the EU Consumer rights organisation - that has launched a website and a campaign to act as counterweight and lobbying entity against the rampant DRM overkill and privacy violations and other bullshit that's going on in the hands of the media companies right now. This is direly needed - the big media throw unreal amounts of effort and money on getting EU legislation to grant them the most preposterous rights (can you say Outlaw-the-shift-button?) - it's about time that someone with at least a little Ooomph steps in and guards the people.

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:

"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.