Sometime in the near future, I predict that the US will require some form of photo I.D before using an internet kiosk. As usual, the spin will be to protect the children.
USA is pretty low on the list of countries I could imagine implementing something like this. Given Russia's, China's, and a large portion of SEA countries' internet censorship track records...
I'd put the USA pretty high on that list. They've implemented plenty of their take-downs over the past year, and are more capable of introducing something like this than any SEA state.
That's not the point at all. The USA claims to be a bastion of democracy and freedom. Therefore it has significantly higher standards to live up to than countries like Russia and China.
I have a better idea. Make it so that some traffic receives higher priority than others, and force content providers to have to pay to play. Then limit competition at the ISP level so that to succeed you have to pay a monopoly to carry your traffic in a timely manner.
No need for something as heavy as what you propose.
They've done a pretty good job of scaring people into securing their APs (which is also a legitimate thing in most cases); just publishing some stories about people having ISP service cut off due to freeloaders doing bad stuff would probably be enough; wouldn't even need to try to prosecute some.
>They've done a pretty good job of scaring people into securing their APs
How is this even remotely a bad thing? It's trivial to MITM people on unsecured networks - I can't think of a single consumer router that actually does DHCP snooping to prevent it either.
I think the technology confuses two things:
1. Encrypted traffic between device and wireless hotspot
2. Restricted access to the wireless hotspot (you need a password or it won't give you service)
I want to allow anonymous access, but let the traffic be encrypted. Is there a technical reason why this is not implemented?
I'm very sad by the culture (and moreso, the legal necessity) of restricting wireless access. I want to share, and have at times relied on anonymous wifi to help me get home.
You can run an access point with all the benefits of WPA2/AES, but make the password really simple. Setting your SSID to "PasswordIsBacon" or just using the same SSID and password is a fairly easy way to share access, without running a completely insecure, unencrypted network.
That's "easy to share" which is a much greater hurdle than "publicly accessible". I want strangers to be able to use my wifi in the middle of the night from outside my home. I want devices to connect without any questions or hassle.
A short walk with Wigle shows literally dozens with WPS on, and usually 4-5 with WEP, plus a couple of open ones that aren't paid. WPS is a massive gaping vulnerability as long as you can stay nearby for a few hours, while WEP gives the illusion of security to clueless people but is worthless (yay RC4... worst algorithm ever.).
No, for your convenience, you only need to identify yourself in the case that you exit the kiosk without using any sort of web service account that can be used to identify you ;)