[drzaiusapelord]

>The whole point of the tech is: If you own a network called "CorpWiFi," someone can come along, set up their own AP, and call their WiFi "CorpWiFi" to try and trick clients into connecting to it with the goal of stealing information.

Then contact law enforcement. Building out some vigilante feature into AP's is completely asinine. This is like me seeing someone speed on the expressway and trying to pull them over myself. Of course, we'll abuse that power if given to us!

The FCC needs to up its game. Either allow us to do whatever the hell we want or stop the bad guys. You either have police or you don't. This middle ground of outsourcing enforcement to Cisco and Aruba and other deep pocketed enterprise players was, predictably, abused by terrible corporate citizens and puts home users as a disadvantage as their equipment doesn't have these features.

Or heaven forbid the FCC get off the big donors/money train and strongarm some spectrum so we have more for wifi in the ISM band. How much spectrum is wasted right now on analog radio or other dinosaur services that can be downsampled into bandwidth efficient digital transmissions? Its incredible we have so few bands for our most used infrastructure. Hell, give us channel 14 at least. Figure out a safe way to do this here. We're dying for spectrum yet deep pocketed players buy all they need (mobile networks, clear channel, etc). That's the core problem hereand until we get more wifi spectrum, these shenanigans will continue in one form or another. Smart City isn't knocking you offline because you're some kind of wifi pirate, they're doing it because they want to hog the limited spectrum for their convention customers.

If pirating ssid's were a real problem, we'd all be proposing an ssl-cert like system to verify identities or at least some kind of web of trust to avoid rogue AP's. But its not, its a complete red herring. The real issue is the stingy amount of spectrum allocated to us.

[superuser2]

>Then contact law enforcement. Building out some vigilante feature into AP's is completely asinine. This is like me seeing someone speed on the expressway and trying to pull them over myself. Of course, we'll abuse that power if given to us!

No, it's like any corporation's private security asking you to leave. (Which they absolutely will.)

[DenisM]

Except you don't have property rights over the radio spectrum, unless you licensed it from FCC. It doesn't matter that it's your physical territory - the radio spectrum belong to FCC and them alone.

Similarly, you don't have any rights over the airspace above your land - the FAA does.

[amyjess]

Use of unlicensed radio spectrum requires that you accept any interference caused by others.

[gruez]

so would jamming also count as "interference caused by others"?

[georgemcbay]

Well, yes, but in addition to agreeing to accept interference users of this spectrum also are not allowed to cause interference, so this isn't a good defense strategy for those who would jam you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_47_CFR_Part_15 (see: subpart .5)

[drzaiusapelord]

These companies have enough lobbying dollars to make LE care. LE cares about me pirating Hollywood movies, doesn't it? That didn't just magically happen on its own.