One of the questions people ask is why do we want a CaptivePortal solution when PersonalTelco is all about sharing and community utilization of resources. Well there are a bunch of reasons but the bottom line is control of liability. If it's our network then practically, and legally, we are responsible for it.

See also: CaptivePortal, ActivePortal, NoCatAuth, DebianApImage

Unfortunately public resources get abused, that's just the way the world works most of the time. This means that PersonalTelco (and other WirelessCommunities) has a fine line to walk between being able to maintain control of the network and providing convenient open access.

If you don't understand what issues could potentially arise are here are a few examples:

The point of this is not to scare people, the point is to show that there are real potential risks. I believe that these are all quite unlikely however it pays to prepare for the worst.

It is my belief that we need a method for controlling access to our wireless network. We don't have to use it, but we need to understand the problems involved and have a workable and deployed solution for when the situation arises. We know that the AccessControl methods that commercial AccessPoints provide are inadequate (MAC address filtering can be both snooped and spoofed fairly trivially and the shared key system that WEP provides will not scale in a community environment). Therefore we need to build something, my suggestion is the CaptivePortal system.

-- AdamShand --


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WhyCaptivePortal (last edited 2007-11-23 18:01:33 by localhost)