[MLB-WIRELESS] Commercial use of MW network

[Craig Sanders]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 09:07:04PM +1100, rick wrote:
> from what i understand as well which has been coverd is if we let people use
> it and they are a profit making company, then we get fined a stupid amount of
> money or we get a carrier licence for 10k per year which we lose as soon as
> someone sends pirated files or goes to 4.01 watts
> 
> im not putting cash towards a carrier licence and if a vpn tunnel went thru
> my link for a commercial gain company then i would start up a community
> wireless group in melbourne like the one i thought i was already in

while i certainly don't think that community networks should be open for
exploitation by companies (or anyone else for that matter), there is something
quite disturbing about this extreme attitude.

for one thing, how can you tell if any VPN traffic is commercial or not?
without decrypting it, you can't.  that doesn't mean that VPN's should be
prohibited from MW, though (if they are, then all my gear is for sale
immediately - i want to be able to communicate securely with anyone on the
network who is capable of decent encryption.  in particular, i want a secure
link to my friend's house through the MW network.  while i have no particularly
security-sensitive data, the thought of plain-text broadcast transmissions of
files, emails, chat, etc just horrifies me.  it's wrong)


another disturbing thing about this attitude is that it reminds me of exactly
what was wrong with Fidonet and similar networks back in the 1980s and early
90s.  instead of seeing the network-as-a-whole as a valuable entity in itself,
every node operator just thought of their own little node and enforced whatever
arbitrary policies he/she liked on the data that crossed their node (e.g. many
nodes explicitly reserved the "right" to read and/or censor any private mail
passing through their system).   this basically meant that there was no private
mail on the network, so a valuable facility went (mostly) unused.



> Community wireless, lets keep it for the community

yeah, but don't cut off your nose to spite your face.

craig


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