[OpenWireless Tech] A small question about tracking

[michi1 at michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com]

On 18:01 Sun 04 Nov     , Christian Huitema wrote:
> Germany definitely puts the onus on the router owner, and it is not hard to imagine other European countries following Germany’s example in the future. It is also not hard to imagine “the police”  conducting a smear campaign against open wireless with that argument. At a minimum, that’s a point that should be discussed in the FAQ.

Abuse can be painful even without the kind of liability germany puts on it.
Even if you are not liable, the police might still visit you with a search
warrent and take your computers with them. If you have bad luck, they might
even put you in investigative custody.

Also, I do not worry about a smear campaign in particular. If openwireless is
successful it will happen either way. If there is no abuse potential, it will
be about "poor isps go bankrupt" or "radiation" or something else.

> ...
> The VPN is an interesting mitigation, as it shifts the burden away from the local provider. But how would we implement that exactly? With a filter on packet type? With a “white list” of accepted VPN provider addresses?

The AP side should be easy: A simple packet filter that lets only certain
packets pass (e.g. port 1194 tcp+udp for openvpn). If somebody runs a
different service on that port to bypass this filter, I guess it is rather
unlikely that he/she will sue the AP owner afterwards.

	-Michi
-- 
programing a layer 3+4 network protocol for mesh networks
see http://michaelblizek.twilightparadox.com