[lxgr]

In such a world you can say goodbye to any kind of free Wi-Fi, anonymous proxy etc., since all it would take to burn an IP for a year is to run a port scan from it, so nobody would risk letting you use theirs.

Fortunately, real network admins are smarter than that.

[BLKNSLVR]

Pretty much. I think there's also a responsibility on the part of the network owner to restrict obviously malicious traffic. Allow anonymous people to connect to your network and then perform port scans? I don't really want any traffic from your network then.

Yes, there are less scorched-earth ways of looking at this, but this works for me.

As always, any of this stuff is heavily context specific. Like you said: network admins need to be smart, need to adapt, need to know their own contexts.

[lxgr]

This is how you get really annoying restrictions on public networks, because some harmless traffic will inevitably be miscategorized by an overeager firewall/DPI system.

I’m not saying that there should be zero consequences for allowing bad traffic from your network, but there’s a balance, and I would hate a world in which your policy were more common.

Arguably we are already partially living in that world, as some companies are already blanket-banning entire countries, VPNs etc., rather than coming up with more fine-grained strategies or improving their authentication systems to make brute force login attempts harder. It’s incredibly annoying.

[gzread]

Do you feel coffee shop WiFi should require you to scan your passport to connect, or that it shouldn't exist at all?

[perching_aix]

Not OP, but the latter sounds pretty good actually, yeah. Never understood the free WiFi craze anyways. Just use cellular?

[ipdashc]

Not all of us have cell plans with hotspots ($$$), hotspots often have data caps, cell is often slower or congested, and there are some areas without cell signal. It's also kind of silly from a wider perspective to shove everyone onto the cellular network when most businesses have perfectly decent fiber internet nowadays.

Sure, I'm usually on hotspot, but I personally appreciate when businesses have wifi. Either way, there are always going to be shared networks somewhere.

[miki123211]

What we should actually be doing is WiFi using SIM cards as authentication.

Have it count against your data cap (but make it much cheaper than cellular data). Pay part of that revenue to hotspot-owning businesses. If something bad happens, use the logs that telecoms are already required to keep.

It's very strange to me that we don't have something like this already.

[lxgr]

How about we don't? We really don't need to tie even more things to SIM cards and phone numbers.

Criminals have more than enough ways to still get anonymous SIM cards (at least until every country on the planet makes KYC mandatory for prepaid SIMs), and legitimate users are greatly inconvenienced by this.

> Pay part of that revenue to hotspot-owning businesses.

To subsidize a network connection they probably already need for their business operations, e.g. their payment terminal or POS? Why should I? The marginal cost of an incremental byte on wired Internet connections is basically zero, these days. It's literally too cheap to meter, so why bother?

Besides the centralization and tracking concerns, not nearly every device has a SIM card. Why does my Laptop not deserve to access a coffee shop Wi-Fi, my Kindle to use an in-flight conenction, or my smartwatch to use the gym's network for podcasts?

It's very strange to me that people keep trying to willingly ruin the open Internet.

[gzread]

And you should require your passport to get one of those?

[perching_aix]

ID card you mean ;)) Yes, and we already do.

[gzread]

So that every time you post on social media that you don't like the government, the government can find who said that?

[lxgr]

What an incredibly short-sighted, dystopian view.

I live in a country that has mandatory SIM registration, and it's stopping exactly zero organized criminals – these can just pay a tiny bit more and buy burner phones and use out-of-country SIM cards – while it's making life more complicated and expensive for the average citizen.

Expensive because KYC isn't cheap, and guess who pays for that in the end... And that is assuming that your form of ID is even accepted as a foreigner. In a different country, I literally just spent two days sending back and forth selfies holding my passport(!) to little success. And I guess the customer support reps could now just use the same photos to impersonate me elsewhere, since passport photos provide absolutely zero domain binding and are just about the dumbest thing still seeing widespread adoption.

I don't often use registration-free public Wi-Fis, but I love that they exist, and I would hate if they'd be taken away too. I also just transited at an airport that requires passport scans for Wi-Fi usage, and it feels so backwards.

Thanks for being honest about this, though. I was always wondering who all these people were that are seriously in favor of all this dystopian stuff. Would love to hear why you think that it's a net positive for society.