This is from an article in Secruityfocus.com">.

This has some serious implications for anyone using WiFi. When I first arrived here in Panama, I set up a WiFi bridge within my hotel room at the Las Vegas Suites so I didn't have to string Cat5 cable all over the place. The feed for my connection was another radio set up as a WiFi client, with the antenna pointed at the hotel lobby. While I did have permission from the hotel management to use the connection as much as I wanted as well as set up my office with WiFi in the room, I'm sure we collectively did not have permission to do this from the ISP. I'm sure no one is going to bust me for this in Panama, but if I had been several thousand miles north in Maryland I guess I'd be a criminal.

The Access Point Felony


Even putting up an unencrypted, unprotected wireless access point might conceivably get you in trouble. Let's say that it's a nice day out, and you want to sit in Riverside park on the Upper West Side and enjoy the day. So you plug your Linksys 802.11(g) access point into your cable modem, and sit outside.



You're busted! You see, when you "broadcast" the cable connection, you are opening it up for anyone to potentially use it. So other people can potentially get Internet access from Comcast without paying for it. In Maryland, for example, it is illegal to use an "unlawful telecommunication device" which is a "device, technology, [or] product . . used to provide the unauthorized . . . transmission of . . access to, or acquisition of a telecommunication service provided by a telecommunication service provider." Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Virginia and Wyoming all have laws on the books that may do the same thing.



These laws generally treat "sharing" of Internet connections the same way it would treat "sharing" of Cable TV or Satellite TV services. Thus, while you could invite your neighbors in to watch the latest episode of The Sopranos, you probably couldn't hook a coax into apartment 3B so they could watch from home -- at least without getting the permission of the cable TV company.



You can see this in, for example, Verizon's personal DSL agreement, which states that "[y]ou may not resell the DSL Service, use it for high-volume purposes, or engage in similar activities that constitute resale (commercial or non-commercial), as determined solely by Verizon." So, if Verizon determines that your 802.11 connection constitutes a non-commercial resale (and is unauthorized) not only can it cut you off, but it can make you a felon.



All of this means that the simple act of driving around and getting WiFi connections as needed, something we hope to be able to do (isn't that why we bought the Centrino in the first place?), is fraught with legal risk. One way to counter this is to establish more universal wireless access agreements (like we did with the first cell communications) so we can pay a single fee and move from WAP to WAP freely.



But ultimately if we want to move to ubiquitous wireless computing, where you can use the WiFi protocols for cheap, mobile VOIP communications, or have near universal wireless Internet access, we are going to have to persuade the law to get the hell out of the way.