Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

In 1895 a young Italian studying Maxwell's equations wondered if perhaps you didn't need wires to send an electromagnetic message, and after months of tinkering beamed the first radio message which rang a bell on the other side of his parent's attic.

The first person he showed this to was his mother, who to her credit didn't accuse him of witchcraft but gave him a hug and supported him in all his future ventures.

He then went on to start a company building useful things on top of this discovery, including the first transatlantic wireless radio that saved tens of thousands of lives and is no doubt in part responsible for many of you alive reading this today.

Fast forward a century and skip the long hours and blood, sweat, and tears of millions of scientists and engineers and technicians and factory workers who have further built this technology so instead of just sending Morse code wirelessly at a few words per minute, we can send all of humanity's information to everyone on earth in seconds.

Wifi is one of the most beautiful creations and technological storylines in all of history.

Let's keep it open and free and not sully it with ads and passwords.

WiFi is wonderful magic, but I’m not giving you the password to my private network.

Why not make your community better by having your router also broadcast an open public network?

For the same reasons I don't invite the entire neighborhood into my kitchen for dinner every night. If people want wifi, they can buy it themselves.

They might be dissidents that don't want their internet traffic associated with their physical identity, which makes it quite hard to "buy it themselves" in places where cash isn't used or ID cards are commonly registered.

In which case I don't want their activity associated with my ip.

Dissidenting safely is their problem, not mine.

I agree. If my government ever turns evil, then I'll open my wireless access point.

What jurisdiction are you living in?

Because freeloaders and/or malicious actors will abuse my generosity

Freeloaders? Well, yeah: isn't that the whole point? We're all freeloaders, in some sense, unless you think you've earned the water you drink and the air you breathe. By giving back to the Freeloader-available Resource Pool (the commons), you're becoming less of a freeloader.

Malicious actors? That relies on there being malicious actors physically near you, which isn't necessarily a valid assumption. Set up a DMZ, try it, and see.

Your view will change once you see your home IP address on the search warrant. And no, i am not going to invite the public to share in my vpn too.

(A) That's not how search warrants work.

(B) Having your computers spuriously seized for a police investigation is a risk shared by every computer user, but those investigations cost money. They don't tend to seize your hardware frivolously, except to intimidate (fairly common for security researchers, for some reason). If you have a public Wi-Fi network, and there's no reason to believe you're a culprit, they're more likely to ask you to keep MAC address logs, or shut down the public Wi-Fi network, than assume you dunnit and try to prosecute with insufficient evidence. You're at far more risk running a Tor exit node than a public Wi-Fi network, and most Tor exit nodes don't get raided by the police.

Your neighbours are probably not cybercriminals. It's probably okay to be nice to them.

>> having your computers spuriously seized for a police investigation is a risk shared by every computer user

Not where i live. We have layers of rules specifically designed to prevent random actions by police.

It's not the street-level police who sign the warrants for seizing computer hardware.

Yes, the risk is quite low, but it's a risk shared by any occupant of an INTERPOL member state.

Well, I've certainly earned the plumbing system that supplies the water to my house, I pay for it and my labour indirectly supports the building out of that system.

WiFi isn't some sort of aether, it is created.

> unless you think you've earned the water you drink

Earned? WTF logic is that? I pay for the water I drink. What in the world are you on about?

>Set up a DMZ, try it, and see

No, I don't think I will. I will continue to keep my wifi password protected so that randoms can't degrade my Internet speed by torrenting movies 24/7, send death threats to public officials from my IP address, or engage in other unsavory activities.

Not sure why you are equating a natural resource like air with a paid service like Internet connectivity, but it comes off as bizarre and naive at best.

probably worlds colliding

some ppl view "internet service" similar as access to drinking water, which some countries have legal obligations for and the public sentiment would be very much against you if you deny it to any stranger.

some countries/ppl not so much

Worse than that, some jurisdictions double-dip: regulate internet access like a utility, but treat it as a private resource (allowing regional monopolies that provide barely-usable service and set their own prices); make an internet connection legally mandatory (via a combination of employment, banking, and anti-homeless laws), but decline to fund public libraries (which provide internet access to those who otherwise don't have it).

someone can do some bad tnings on internet with help of your wifi?

I fear what they're up to... Download or broadcasting CP primarily.

who knows what freaky stuff my community gets into.

Free WIFI tragically will fall into the 'tragedy of the commons'.

How much a better place the world would be if we could freely share ANYTHING without getting abused, sabotaged, taken advantage of, taken for granted, getting hate for revoking, whatever we offer?

Or living in fear of a multitude of hypothetical behaviors that objectively most folks just don't engage in. I kept an open network for folks waiting for the bus near my house for close to 10 years. No sabotage, no abuse, no hassles of any kind.

This hits home as we just came from Marconi beach on Cape Cod where one of the antennas was. There is no antenna left, just a plaque marking the spot. In a way it's a little sad how behind this area is at this point compared to the energy of the times.

That's my favorite beach. Whenever I'm there I have to walk to the memorial.

If you ever go back, take the time to walk the hiking path behind the bathrooms. It goes into a gorgeous redwood grove. The boardwalk reminds me of the "tree" level in Myst.

?

I could be wrong but I've never seen redwoods in Massachusetts.

Could just be the local pitch pine. It's all over the cape.

It's Atlantic White Cedar: https://www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/atlanticwhitecedar.ht...

figured it was something like that. thanks!

I would genuinely love to offer free use of my wifi to anyone that needs it.

1. My billing is usage based, the bills could be astronomical

2. Laws around who is at fault are the person paying the bill. My IP address doing who knows what could easily land me in jail.

Sadly, the cons outweigh the pros

I just thought of this, so separate reply. Didn’t CSIRO enforce their WiFi patents pretty thoroughly?

Marconi always gets credit, but Tesla invented it:

https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html

No. Your source makes clear that Marconi sent the first message (Tesla failed to send a radio message in 1895, Marconi succeeded). Read "My Father Marconi" by his daughter Degna. Fantastic book.

Other than that, a very fascinating read, the link you shared. Patent stuff is silly, but were way less silly back then, and had more positive 2nd order effects back then.

It was cool how Tesla and Marconi held each other in high regard, and built on each other's works.

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