I am sure everyone saw the news that San Fran was going to Muni WiFi. I have a dumb question. How in the world will users authenticate?
I mean, lets say it is a truely open, insecure, wireless network. Anybody with a NIC can connect. The only thing that would/could personally identify a PC would me the MAC address, right? Being as it is trivial to spoof a MAC address, i can't imagine that Goolink could use that as much of an identifier. Any type of wireless encryption (WEP or WPA), while only providing incrementally more "security" would cause tons more complexity to 95% of the user base, and the other 5% could beat the security. I would think any kind of password/passphrase based system would be highly complicated and minimally effective (which is why i always guessed it would be wide open access).
So, if it is wide open, and people realize that the MAC address is NOT a unique ID (because it can be easily spoofed and sniffed), it would seem that *AA would not allow the system! Whats to keep the Warez/open proxy/spamming/"evil" types from making incredible use of the anonimity?
Finally, what keeps someone from filling their PC with Wireless cards (each with thier own mac address) to get 5 x the free WiFi (and making a nice, anonomous proxy)?
Tim