[CWN-Summit] FON

[David Young]

On Sat, Sep 09, 2006 at 12:16:11PM -0500, Dave Chakrabarti wrote:
> David,
> 
> So I picked a bad example :) But I'm sure you'll agree that FON has
> managed to reach a fairly large number of people in a short period of
> time, and is positioning itself to reach into the non-geek,
> non-early-adopter community.

Agreed.  That is exciting.  I wish the grassroots, open-source groups
had such success getting the non-geeks involved.

> Without a centralized server, I'm not sure how you'd handle
> authorizations. Maybe you don't need authorizations? Maybe we just need
> to serve up a page that says hey, this is social source wifi sharing,
> use it for free and enjoy...

If the purpose of authorization is to keep "freeloaders"---i.e., those
who do not contribute by operating a hotspot at home---off the network,
then a hotspot away from home can authorize access with the help of
other hotspots.  Essentially, the hotspot away from home can ask your
hotspot at home, "do you recognize this client?"  (Perhaps your client
identifies itself with a cookie.)  Your hotspot at home says, "Yes,
I know that client.  Here are my references," and it supplies the IP
addresses for a number of hotspots whose owners have visited your home
hotspot.  The hotspot away from home queries each of those hotspots,
who (we hope) will vouch for your home hotspot, indicating that their
owners have used it.

> My main concern with FON is the privacy / security side of the equation.
> As someone pointed out on their forums, the FON service presents a
> gigantic marketing opportunity. Everything goes through their DNS. They
> could have a log of all of your traffic and all of your content /
> conversations in an effort to a. sell you stuff and b. keep our
> terrorist-hunting governments happy. I'm not well-versed with wifi /
> networking tech enough to know how this works, but since everything runs
> through their portal, I'm assuming it's feasible. Giving Google's
> affinity for this kind of marketing, I'm also a little nervous that
> they've invested heavily in the FON project.

It does sound like a data-miner's dream come true!  You can find out
users' location, too.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933