FWIW: It appears as soon as marriot corporate discovered this, they ordered them not to do it again.
Their rationale/justification was that because WiFi at scale (40k attendees, couple hundred exhibitors) the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for and caused issues with their demos (which the attendees paid entry fees to see).
Convention centers operate in the world of unrealistically high pricing that is rarely seen outside of airport newsstands . For example, they wanted to charge us $3k for renting a 42" TV for 3 days. We ended up just buying a 27" Thunderbolt display and saved a ton (and had a nice monitor to give to one of our devs after the show).
These high-end WiFi systems are expensive to install and administer. But that those prices they were charging, they've paid for the system in, like, the first day. Maybe by lunch time.
Conference stuff in general is crazy.
EDITED: In the U.S., all RF bandwidth is administered by the FCC for the benefit of the public. AFAIK, even if there's a "traffic jam" in the local WiFi spectrum, private parties don't get to unilaterally block off the WiFi bandwidth and charge for access. That'd be like a shopping mall's dealing with its Black-Friday traffic jams by setting up toll booths to block the adjoining public highways and charging vehicles to go through.
(My original comment referred to cell-service bandwidth, which of course isn't the only problem, as @coleca correctly points out.)
Spectrum is spectrum. Convention centers don't own WiFi spectrum any more than they own cell phone spectrum.
It's not their spectrum to manage, and everyone else has just as much right to use it as they do, event or no event.
Deliberate interference of the legal use of the airwaves by others is flat out illegal.
It is the right of universities and employers to disallow WiFi hotspots as a condition of being on the property. Why shouldn't this apply to hotels?
Citation, please? This is an area of the law with which I'm not too familiar.
I do recall from dim memory that private-property rights aren't without limits. For example:
+ The (U.S.) National Labor Relations Act puts limits on an employer's right to prohibit employee collective action on the employer's property;
+ Similarly, various civil-rights acts prohibit the owner of a business from refusing service to people on impermissible discriminatory grounds (race, national origin, etc.);
+ [ADDED:] Anti-trust law places limits on a business owner's ability to say, for example, I'll sell you my patented photocopier only if you agree to buy all your unpatented paper from me as well.
[EDITED:] I'm not saying the first two laws apply in this case. I am suggesting that anti-trust law, and perhaps federal communications law, might analogously limit the ability of the owner of a business to require guests, as a condition of admission, to forego their lawful access to the public spectrum. That practice seems roughly analogous to the conference company saying, "you can attend our conference, but only if you travel to the conference center in one of the expensive private limousines that we've arranged for, instead of in a cab."
Are we going to treat WiFi according to airspace protocol? Can a company or operation claim ownership to a quasi-physically-contained airspace? Perhaps invoke claims of trespassing by other non-approved, non-financially viable, sources? If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.
>Because (1) a jammer is an unlicensed transmitter and (2) jammers do not just jam with discretion they jam for as far as they reach and it is impossible to operate a jammer in such a way that you cover all the territory without extending beyond it in some places.
Jammers can interfere with people's ability to contact emergency services. Obviously in the case of WiFi this is not an immediate concern because 911 is currently reached through a different wavelength, but WiFi is integrating into infrastructure (WoT, etc...) such that jammers can be a real cause for concern (especially if they are operated by poorly trained people).
>If you're living/working/visiting under my roof, then my rules, my WiFI.
What about the scenario where you have an ISP that offers city-wide WiFi to its subscribers. A Marriott is within the bounds of this area, they block access to a service I pay for and they have approval to provide me with. Who is in the wrong?
That's one way to look at it. But it doesn't square with an important fact, namely that under U.S. law, you don't own the RF spectrum, even though RF waves happen to exist "on" "your" property.
Keep in mind that in a civil society, property ownership and the autonomy that goes with it are largely social constructs that can and are limited by the rest of us. Marriott might imagine that it "owns" a conference facility and can do what it wants with it. Certainly for most purposes that's a reasonable approximation of the truth. But: Marriott gets to exclude, say, Alice from walking into the conference facility, not by virtue of some natural right, but solely because the rest of us have tacitly agreed that our police and, ultimately, our armed forces will back Marriott up if it chooses to do so.
(That is, of course, unless Marriott happen to have access to a militia or other armed force; @Rayiner has written about related topics in other threads here.)
And whether Marriott likes it or not, the rest of us, via our duly-elected or -appointed representatives, have decreed:
1. that the public airwaves are no one's private property; and
2. that in certain circumstances, "tying" arrangements, in which a seller requires a purchaser to buy an unwanted product or service B as a condition of being able to buy wanted product or service A, are unlawful --- that is to say, the seller's autonomy in respect of its goods and services only goes so far. [1]
It's therefore not an incoherent argument that Marriott may not require Alice, while in the conference facility, to use only Marriott's expensive WiFi network, as opposed to using, say, the phone in her pocket as a WiFi hotspot of her own.
The first one is perfectly okay, your private property, your rules, the second is in violation of the law.
This device complies with part 15 of FCC Rules.
1) This device may not cause harmful interference.
2) This device must accept any interference received,
including interference that may cause undesired operation.My understanding of #2 in rule is that it's meant to protect against incidental interference causing complaints to the FCC. If the ham operator across the street makes your TV/dental fillings act weird, you can't ask the government to go shut him down.
In any case, it also probably depends on the precise legal definition of "interference", "must accept", and so on.
If you expose unrestricted access to sensitive stuff to everyone on the dorm ethernet, sinister wifi hackers on the sidewalk outside is the least of your worries. Your university IT was trying to cover their incompetence with random authoritarianism.
When a network device is attached that doesn't pass this authentication requirement onto its users (i.e. by NATing, or offering a public or common-key WiFi network) the university loses its ability to see who is doing what, and to deny access to people it doesn't want on its network. IT departments don't like that.
The security risk is not so much that you can now route certain internal IPs, but that IT has no way of determining who you are, or even your real MAC address, if it has questions about or objections to your traffic (whether
Hopefully no one is placing sensitive services on the same network as dorm rooms with no security, but being on the LAN is often used as a front line. For one thing, sitting on the right part of the campus network gets you access to most scientific journals based on IP whitelisting. The University is contractually not allowed to provide this access to people who aren't students/faculty/staff, so it has to control who can come from those IPs. We operate separate SSIDs for guests that route to the internet through IPs not in the whitelist. We also have certain intranet-only services like Facilities work orders, printing, etc. that could be on the public internet, but don't need to be, so better to those aging, likely vulnerable applications behind a layer than not.
You may be confusing a wifi hotspot with a wifi router. It's certainly reasonable for the owners of a physical network to disallow users to plug in their own wifi routers, especially because it can cause problems, even potentially taking down the entire network with loops and rogue DHCP servers. There are ways the owner can prevent those problems, but it comes at higher cost of equipment
I don't see why a hotspot would be any different than a mobile phone. Some places tell you to turn them off, because it interrupts the movie, and they may ask you to leave if you don't. But they don't jam phones and provide high cost alternatives.
They want to know who is using the network and wireless access points remove some of that control.
Likewise, it's probably trivial to ignore these deauth packets if you're running your own boxes (although it'll probably be more problematic if you wanted tablet / phone access, too).
I imagine that a contract that says, "You won't run a hotspot, and if we catch you doing it, we'll kick you out" would be fine. But actually jamming the radio signals would not be.
They weren't using a radio jammer, but using techniques just like were described in the article. We tried getting our gear setup and couldn't get anything working, even trying to use Internet connection sharing over Wifi between a Macbook and an iPad right next to each other wouldn't work. Until we got a hold of the network engineer for the convention and got him to whitelist our MAC addresses on their own APs. Then all of a sudden all our gear sprang to life. He told us they were looking for rogue APs and were sending frames to their clients to disassociate. If you were an attendee and not an exhibitor you could use the free public WiFi that was available. But we were warned that was far too flaky to use for product demos and would require re-registration every hour.
We also had to use commercial grade APs (like Cisco, Aruba, etc.) that could have the signal strength turned way down so it wouldn't bleed too far out of our booth. The WiFi APs at your local Staples don't usually have this option; they only boost the signals, not lower them.
They have no authority to be able to interfere with your use of spectrum, just as you have none to interfere with theirs.
i think if a teenager did it to the Marriot then a closest DA or an FBI office would be immediately having the teenager on "unauthorized access" at minimum if not on some nice terrorism charge
Congratulations, first DDOS of a geographical site instead of a virtual one. :P
Note: This is kinda a dick move because you're probably screwing over the customers more than you are the IT douchebags. Maybe a better plan is to find the Marriott headquarters, mockup a visitor badge, and do it there.
Sounds to me like an unlawful tie-in, in violation of the anti-trust laws.
Besides, I much prefer spending time with my son reading Asterix the Gaul comic books.
I don't picture this idea ending well.
All the airport newsstands that I've seen have been free.
"“Consumers who purchase cellular data plans should be able to use them without fear that their personal Internet connection will be blocked by their hotel or conference center,”"
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014... http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-b...