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Chuckles08 writes "Forbes has a story about how FreedomPop is trying to disrupt the public Wi-fi business. From the article: 'Getting hosed by your Internet service provider may seem as inevitable as death and taxes, but a new startup aims to change that. Startup FreedomPop, which is backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, DCM and Mangrove Capital, provides cheaper Internet access and the ability for people to share access with others on its network.'"

I hope it can disrupt the connectivity oligopoly that reigns at the moment. North America's connectivity is, on average, twice as bad as Romania in 30 something position. Lets do this!

There's only one resource the government cannot absolutely control and manipulate at the behest of their corporate masters: The air. If you want better internet, a free and open internet, that is resistant to censorship and manipulation of commercial interests, you're going to have to start with making a wireless technology that is capable of sending data at a high rate of speed over considerable distance, be resistant to jamming and fading, and even more resistant to being triangulated and traced back to i

you're going to have to start with making a wireless technology that is capable of sending data at a high rate of speed over considerable distance, be resistant to jamming and fading, and even more resistant to being triangulated and traced back to its source.

You mean, a laundry list of things that are mostly not even theoretically possible? Just because you have a long wishlist doesn't mean any of those things are feasible, or even make sense.

I really don't recall just how technically-specific Cory Doctorow got, but this is something out of his book, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," where a side character is setting up an ad-hoc mesh network. Yeah, it can work for a city, but someone's gonna have to provide the 'last mile' of data from some server miles away running on a corporate-owned line. But, it's a start. Unfortunately, many cities were sued for trying to make their own network for free access on the grounds of unfair competi

At some point, someone is going to get into *serious* legal trouble through this. Most likely via someone using their connection transfering child porn and getting caught. It only has to happen once. The story will be widely publicised, including all the horrifying details of the caught-in-the-middle victim having their life torn apart, losing their job, being vilified by their neighbours, and having every computer, phone, games console, hard drive and USB stick they own confiscated as evidence. As a result of this, other users will be terrified to share their connection and risk becoming the next victim of an investigation.

ipv6 could address this problem very easily... no nat allowed on the box, every device have its own ip.

There is still NAT capabilities with IPv6. Of course, that is also assuming the home networks run IPv6 internally as opposed to using IPv4 internally and the router device (cable/DSL/fibre modems) converting to IPv6.

Won't get that far. Comcast is part of the MPAA now... they'll just wait all 30 seconds until someone downloads an illegal copy of a movie, then sue with everything they have. FreedomPop will burn through all their startup funds paying legal fees, and blink out of existence.

At some point, someone is going to get into *serious* legal trouble through this. Most likely via someone using their connection transfering child porn and getting caught. It only has to happen once.

Nothing can ever happen if everyone is always content to sit in the corner cowering in fear of what could happen. Such a society would suck ass.

I would counter your argument by asking a stupid question... How many tens? hundreds? of millions of PCs are compromised botnet zombies?

Why could not the same argument of CP raid risk be extended to simply owning a PC? We've all heard of encryption ransomware why not CP raid ransom or your compromised system being used to traffic the same? What is the difference?

The CP virus stuff has happened and nearly ruined at least one person's life. Unfortunately can't cite my source at the moment.

The fundamental difference though is that people generally don't *choose* to get infected with viruses. The CP virus hits, some people get scared, but most of them wouldn't know how to clean their PC nor keep it clean if their life depended on it. (And let's face it, given how CP is treated legally, your life kind of does depend on it... )

I know a few people in Germany that run a free public Wi-Fi network and they have tried to get registered as an internet provider (alas, without success). Providers are not held liable for what people do using their connection; why should this be legally different? It seems that the only difference is that you are not paying for it.

I know a few people in Germany that run a free public Wi-Fi network and they have tried to get registered as an internet provider (alas, without success). Providers are not held liable for what people do using their connection; why should this be legally different? It seems that the only difference is that you are not paying for it.

If it takes a charge to be registered as an ISP, then charge for it - charge 0.01 Euro per 10 years, to be paid in 2099.

In a nutshell, the ISP where I work doesn't do any active logging beyond the basic router logs. Right now, 90-95% of our customers are NATed, so we don't even lease that many public IPs from the tier 2 provider we use. To my knowledge, the most we do is provide information when it is requested (within reason), or by court order.

There was a customer with some suspicious activity from their modem that connected to (I'm not joking) known international IPs of organizations that are bad news. When we were con

... FDN here is an ISP for more than 10 years now, non-profit, and I believe the only one that does not restrict you from re-providing your access, via wifi for instance, to other people "in the street".

All others ISPs in the country have definitive restrictions, which oblige for instance all hotels and campings to apply for specific different contracts (which, guess what, are much more costly)

FDN has the curious intent to demultiplicate themselves into smaller, regional ISPs rather than "getting more custo

What we really need is some kind of low cost "FreeBox" appliance running some kind of fully cryptographed, non-open-Internet-connected, private, distributed, point-to-point, wireless network, perhaps running the Freenet project or something similar, that people could attach to their routers and instantly get access to it alongside their commercial Internet connection. That, and people willing to install it all around, so that whenever you go you get anonymous access to the parallel network. And a law or jud

You mean like my wireless darknet project [darkpi.com]? Yeah, people are working on it, but you know how it is...we all gotta live, and between playing server admin, school, and trying to find a long term job, it's tough to find time (and money) to dedicate to it.

Same goes for Tor. I'd never run a Tor endpoint on my connection, because people use it for all kinds of nefarious activity. Last time I tried Tor, I went to 4chan (not that I need Tor for 4chan, but I was just testing various sites), and found that the endpoint I had connected to was banned, for guest what? child porn. When the authorities find out that child porn was coming through your connection, they don't go and know politely at your door. They bash the door in, in the middle of the night, and all

Assuming for the moment that the real problem comes from IP's logged by servers and handed over to the cops, so that TLS won't solve this - has anybody worked on a distributed HTTP proxy that will scatter and gather HTTP byte range requests?

The person using the proxy system would get the whole file, but each proxy itself would only ever get a part of the file. I'm also assuming that a judge would throw out a charge for downloading 1/100th of a naughty picture.

If more people did it then the feds wouldn't have such an easy time busting down peoples doors. The whole reason the courts are OK with it is because it is seen as highly probable that the owner or someone within the household committed a crime. However if you have shared access then there is a higher chance that a neighbor did it. If you multiply that and half of the busts are of innocent people there it defeats the points of busting people in the first place.

I was keen on this until I had a look at the privacy policy. They don't even pay lipservice to privacy, explicitly saying that they will combine whatever information they get from you with information from third parties and also share your information with third parties. I wouldn't use this without a VPN.

In the city of Groningen, The Netherlands, population 180,000, the cable company has converted the wireless routers of most of the subscribers into dual private and open Wi-Fi access points. Almost all subscribers agreed to participate. In return the subscribers can use each others access points using their own username and password. As you walk or cycle down the street the connection stays permanent as you move from one access point to the next. Both the cable company and the wireless phone operators are in fierce competition with asymmetrical infrastructure. This move by the cable company seems to be designed to undercut the need for 3G/4G access for tablets and smartphones. There are plans to roll out this new type of usage throughout the country.

Absolutely, it is just an attempt by the cable company to keep it's customers from going to the competition for commercial reasons. The cable company does not have a cellular phone network and in this way tries to add functionality to compensate for that. It might become an interesting development.

Ziggo tunnels visitor traffic so customer that hosts access point don't need to worry about cops knocking on door due someone else abusing connection. It's same way Finnish provider "Wippies" did years ago before closing down. This is also right way to solve this problem and also fixes at least routing an

Basically, users from your carrier get to use your Wifi, and in return you get to use their own Wifi routers across the country.

France is not alone, either. For carriers, it's a cheap way to roll-out a nationwide Wifi network, with the added benefit that they can then redirect mobile data traffic to land pipes, resulting in less encumbered wireless networks.

Stokols believes this service will disrupt others such as FON, another free Wi-Fi startup. That’s because FON cuts deals with large telecommunications providers such as BT, while FreedomPop doesn’t need to. FON users do not share the majority of their access, because they are home users where others in residential areas do not need access as much, he says.

Unfortunately FreedomPop is building their service on top of Clearwire's WiMax service, which doesn't bode well for the performance or the reliability of the resulting service.

Clearwire ceased their buildout more than a year ago, and assuming they survive the next few years will be trying to roll out an LTE network on their spectrum. In the meantime their WiMax network is already oversubscribed both on a per-tower basis and a backhaul basis; as a result the actual speed of the service isn't much better than CDMA 3G, never mind HSPA+ or LTE. Adding a bunch of users is only going to make this worse, especially since FreedomPop isn't the only service taking advantage of Clearwire's cutthroat rates.

Clearwire's 2.6GHz spectrum may also be a minor concern here. Based on the results of Clearwire's own efforts, their spectrum works well for mobile use but has a lot of trouble penetrating homes, which is where a service like FreedomPop is most likely to be used.

Ultimately like any other wireless service this is going to be entirely area-dependent. But for most users they're effectively buying into a cheap 3G-ish service with no quality of service standards. It's cheap, but that's about all FreedomPop has going for it.

When I lived in Portland, I tried ClearWire because the price was awesome, and my DSL sucked the big one. The only place I could get reception was if I held the modem above my head in the back yard, with it plugged into a 30' extension cord. And that was in one of their most built out markets.

Watch out, they're full of hidden charges on their "free" 500MB/mon 4G service. If you don't use at least 10MB/mon, they charge you a fee. Data is rounded when it's used so it keeps rounding up. If you go over 400MB and don't have at least $10 in your account with them, they charge you so you have money in your account. Basically you have to use at least 10MB but less than 400MB a month to keep things free and with the data rounding that becomes very hard. Additionally, while they say they refund the p