Karma - pay as you go data by sharing your hotspot

In my experience with ATT, they only know what your phone is if you purchase it through ATT. If, for example, you buy a Nexus 4 from Google and tell ATT that it's a dumb phone, they won't know it's actually a smartphone since they don't have the IMEI on file.

Clear throttles customers after a certain threshold. In addition ozi's comment is accurate.

I was thinking about this too, but there is one problem with a purely pay-it-forward type model - there is no 'debt'.

That is, how does one earn karma in order to buy uptime?

You can 'sell' your connection to someone else, but where do they get their karma from?

Part of the solution might be to provide 'seed' karma to new users, but then you inevitably will have users who don't spend the karma they gain and so become karma sinks.

This all assumes a zero sum economy, so perhaps a different model is a better idea. Keep track of metrics like how much bandwidth someone has shared or used (somehow), and then allow providers to define a measure for who can share their connection based on those metrics.

For example, one provider might let anyone connect no matter what, while someone else might only let people who have shared their own connection connect.

Determining what to share and to whom is a hard question, and when there are upstream costs to the provider the balance seems like it would be hard to find. The yourkarma model is more or less a loss-leading strategy (we pay you in bandwidth to sign up new users) and it's hard to see that being sustainable long term for the user. It's not completely obvious if the 100mb is for new karma users connecting, or for any connection, but based on their help page[1] it seems to be only new users:

Why do I get extra bandwidth when I share my connection?

Every time another person uses Karma, our company grows a little bigger. The more the merrier! So when you share your connection, you are essentially helping us and we feel like we should help you. After all, we’re not called Karma for nothing.

What I am really interested in are the ad-hoc networking projects [2], that will be able to route data by hopping between networked devices, reducing the need of centralised ISPs. Simply being part of that network adds value, however similar problems will probably arise in any case.

[1] https://yourkarma.com/help/82-why-do-i-get-extra-bandwidth-w...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network

> So disruptive.

OMG you fucking tryhard SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

Exactly. The SSID proves precisely nothing. It is sad to see them to claim it "keeps people honest."

This "Karma FirstName" scheme is going to alienate some potential customers. Also, I suspect the added advertising boost from letting your users be clever would offset losses. But that is a simple empirical question. It wouldn't be hard at all. How many new signups per hotspot do you get from hotspots with custom SSIDs versus stock SSIDs?

Looking forward to seeing what security measures they do have in place to prevent someone from spoofing. At an abstract level, the device is going to need to contain some public-key (or something similar) that it sends somewhere on the Internet which is then verified with a private key. Then it's got to tell the user whether or not it's a real Karma hotspot or there's trouble.

There will always be a risk. But it could at least be managed to the point where it is one of the lesser Internet risks.

Remember this isn't really a new security hole for users of public wifi. Just setting up your own Starbuck's access point (dlink) and loading it with malware and snooping would do the same thing.

I don't really know how SSL works over a compromised access point. So maybe there are safeguards. But I tend to assume if the access point is compromised, all my base are belong to them. Or at least the data I send.