Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

hotelwifitest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 240 posts

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#221

Post by diminoten »

DanBC wrote: post #220
diminoten wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably a reason for the fact that there has never been a criminal case such as you've described, and it's for that reason the above poster is safe in writing what he did.

So, you ignore the bits of the Swartz case which were about his access of a network by spoofing MAC address and user agent? You also ignore all the "piggybacking" cases? Here are a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking#Unite... Here's the Met Police saying that they intend to prosecute all such behaviour: http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/22/us-britain-wireles... Still: I'm not sure how you…

Read what I wrote more carefully.

I said that the same reasons why there has not been a court case are the reasons why the above commenter can safely write what he has written without fear of prosecution.

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#222

Post by wikwocket »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #186
TimJRobinson wrote: post #176

Tip for travellers: Learn how to set a static IP address on your devices. I've been travelling through South East asia for the last 3 months and at about 20 - 30% of the hotels I stay at the WiFi works fine but their DHCP does not. I presume this is because most routers in default config cache IP address for clients and when they run out of free IP address they just fail to assign new ones to new clients. If you noti…

xxx being between 50 - 200 You're probably better off with a lower number that would likely be outside of the dhcp pool. It's fairly standard to set aside the first 5-20 addresses for future network equipment.

I am not sure whether the people who set up off-the-shelf residential routers with default settings are going to follow standard best practices for network design... ;)

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#223

Post by brownbat »

DanBC wrote: post #202
brownbat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> courts reject arguments like this. If by "arguments like this," you mean following the law but with suspect motives, then one of the strengths of the legal system in the US is that the courts absolutely accept arguments like these. In criminal matters, you typically need both intent and some act forbidden by statute before a finding of guilt. You can't indict someone for ill will. Intent alone is not generally suff…

> In criminal matters, you typically need both intent and some act forbidden by statute before a finding of guilt. You can't indict someone for ill will. Obtaining goods by deception seems to cover this. Especially with the public admission of "I siged on, and had to pay, but discovered that my colleague did not have to pay so I was deceptive about the equipment I used, and the only reason I was deceptive was to avoi…

> Obtaining goods by deception

aka "false pretenses" or misrepresentation statutes.

Sure, this could fall under those statutes in jurisdictions where that covers services. Defendant would have several ways to make that case a nightmare, to the point where I see it as basically absurd to prosecute, but still conceivably illegal.

I wasn't trying to comment on whether there's some action involved in logging into a network that could satisfy some element in criminal law though. There absolutely could be some "actus reus" from a login.

I was really just intending to respond to the general comment about courts accepting arguments of the sort like, "this is technically permitted under the law, therefore legal." Maybe I misread that point though, maybe cynicalkane's "technically allowed" meant "allowed by the protocol" not "technically allowed by law."

In which case, consider my wandering diatribe above thoroughly moot. :)

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#224

Post by brownbat »

praptak wrote: post #135
brownbat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> courts reject arguments like this. If by "arguments like this," you mean following the law but with suspect motives, then one of the strengths of the legal system in the US is that the courts absolutely accept arguments like these. In criminal matters, you typically need both intent and some act forbidden by statute before a finding of guilt. You can't indict someone for ill will. Intent alone is not generally suff…

It's not about following the law with suspect motives. It's about the fact that following the technical protocol does not give you much defense against unlawful access charges.

That's absolutely correct.

I was responding to the naked phrase "technically allowed," which in hindsight is ambiguous (ie, "allowed under the law via a technicality," or "technologically feasible").

Rereading, I still think I interpreted correctly the first time, but really can't be sure.

Good catch.

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#225

Post by JadeNB »

DanBC wrote: post #198
JadeNB wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely spoofing the user agent is unobjectionable at worst, and spoofing the MAC address perhaps only mildly discouraged? I can't imagine its actually being illegal (but, then again, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking for unexpected illegalities).

Well, it depends what the hotel policy is. If it's "free wifi for Apple devices" then there's some kind of fraud happening. The fact that the hotel is incompetent in preventing that fraud by relying on UserAgent seems less important than intent of user when changing UA string.

I'm not sure that I agree with that interpretation --if you stand on the street and say "free hugs for Georges", and I say "I'm a George", has fraud occurred? I guess that I mean --is any misrepresentation, even in the absence of a contract, a (legal) fraud?

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#226

Post by sanswork »

driverdan wrote: post #214
sanswork wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile hotspots are good but expensive. My wife and I have been working/living off one for the past 6 weeks and we're averaging around $100/week on internet costs even with extremely limiting our usage.

I have a Clear hotspot that costs me $55/m for 10/2 Mb and is unlimited use. The only time they've throttled me was when I watched Netflix for 8h straight.

Things like Clear are designed as home internet solutions so they have very small coverage areas. They don't work well for travelling.

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#227

Post by coldtea »

cynicalkane wrote: post #122
terhechte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oftentimes, the reason for this is that those hotels were particularly early in offering their guests internet access but then bought into a draconian external service provider with awful service, high fees, very long contract duration, and slow speed. Usually, when I'm in an expensive hotel with awful (paid) internet, I speak up and they explain this to me. The last hotel where that happened explained to me that man…

The standard solution (via Coase's theorem of economics) is that they should just buy out the contracts, but it seems this isn't happening. I wonder why this is.

Because even Coase himself showed that his theorem is BS in real life situations: "In this 1960 paper, Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality."

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#228

Post by cnst »

thejosh wrote: post #108
cnst wrote: post #107

I used to be fond of requiring high speed internet access in the hotels. I gave up, upgraded to Unlimited 4G on my T-Mobile line, and don't worry about these things anymore. Problem solved! :-) Unfortunately, you're very unlikely to be getting decent speeds and latency at the hotels, and most managers don't even care.

Yeah, but if you're travelling internationally it's a PITA. :)

Are you referring to the throttling of 128kbps for T-Mobile US postpaid customers travelling internationally? :-)

Well, yeah, that ain't gonna be fast, but, if hotels abroad have as crappy the internet as those in the States do, that's still likely to be a huge improvement. :-)

Or you could always get a local SIM for some more unlimited fun.

Re: Choose hotels by the quality of their WiFi

#229

Post by cnst »

einrealist wrote: post #185
justincormack wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic shaping for some definition of fairness?

They say that the traffic is shaped. But it does not feel like that. Maybe their router is just to slow to handle all those connections.

Often only the downstream is shaped; if you have lots of p2p, you might want to ensure they do traffic shaping for upstream, too.

Where's your hotel? How'd you manage to get 100Mbit uplink? :-) Most hotels I've stayed at have either Cable (if it's 3* or below), or DSL / T1 (if it's something like 3*+ Hyatt Place), and they're all ridiculously slow.

Post reply on HN