Hilton, Marriott and co want permission to JAM guests' personal Wi-Fi Top hotel chains want permission in the US to disrupt guests' personal Wi-Fi hotspots – a move that would force people to use expensive hotel wireless instead. The hoteliers, including Hilton and Marriott, have urged US watchdog the FCC to allow them to cripple mobile hotspots because, they claim, such devices interfere with …
The hotels are really just trying to help lawmakers keep up with current practice. The law suits mentioned in the article are simply instances in which they got caught. Preventing guests from using their own internet service is SOP for hotels. As was pointed out by a fellow commentard, high-end hotels want to charge for everything they can. Sadly, in this case they are hawking substandard service with atrocious security built in.
While I do think they are doing this for the money, I can see it from a network management point of view as well. We attended a (non-technical) trade show a couple of years ago, and every man and his dog had their own Wifi set up for their own stand. This made wifi unusable, both for the exhibitors and for the visitors.
The next year, the show operator said no individual wifi. They invested a lot in decent wireless comms, and told everyone they must use that. They would even set it up so it dropped directly into your own stand's network. Things went a lot more smoothly.
The difference here is that they offered it free, both to guests and to exhibitors. If these hotels did the same (or at least charged a reasonable amount) they wouldn't need to de-auth people.
No they didn't, they just included it in the price of attending the convention. Although I'll grant most people don't quite see the difference.
Depending on the location and the terms of the rental contracts, the use of personal wifi can be excluded in meeting locations. And you're right, money is always a part of it. It's just a question of whether or not the payment is reasonable given the circumstances.
BTW, we are faced with the problem here that they want to change the law to something that we all think is wrong. It's like with banksters, they (mostly) don't break the laws, the laws are just plain wrong. In a democracy the laws now must be changed.
In a democracy, the winner is whomever has the most money.
In this case, the winner will be the side that has the best lobbying group, regardless of the law. I know, it sucks, but that's the world we live in.
In a democracy, the winner is whomever has the most money.
In English, that final pronoun is in the nominative case, and so the preferred word is "whoever".1 "Whomever" is false elevation.
"[whoever] has the most money" is a dependent clause, in which "whoever" is the subject. Thus nominative case, regardless of how the clause acts as a unit in the larger sentence.
And even if the pronoun's case weren't the determining factor here, the verb in this case is the copula, so the predicate is a predicate nominative and not an objective phrase, and so it still takes the nominative case. The only object in the whole sentence is the noun phrase "the most money".
English grammar and usage are really very straightforward once you memorize a whole bunch of rules and carefully analyze the structure of every phrase and sentence.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled complaining about hotels.
1Some damned prescriptivist is likely to complain either that the pronoun is, in fact, incorrectly in the objective case; or that "preferred" should be replaced with something stronger. The first claim is incorrect - case is determined by grammatical use, not by whether the standard (or "correct") inflection is used. The second is just the prescriptive fantasy.
Although technically, sending de-authentication packets isn't jamming, it has the same effect, that is preventing devices from communicating with each other. Note that the hotel isn't using these devices to manage it's own network equipment, but those of it's customers. Therefore they are interfering with the proper operation of other people's communications services, which has to be against some law.
It's not as if the Ts&Cs of the hotel residency explicitly authorise the hotel to do this, is it?
Lawyers make their millions on precisely these technicalities.
And the sticky bit is that if I own a 50 acre plot with my house in the middle of it, I'm allowed to have all the cell jammers I want in my house so long as I don't jam outside my property. If I jam past it, I'm breaking the law. Hotels occupy an odd semi-private, semi-public spot in the legal world. Hence the FCCs ability to levy the fine and the Hotel's right to challenge it.
In the end, I think the FCC got this one right and I expect it's what the courts will eventually uphold. It might take a long time though.
Any hospital using wireless for critical systems will get precisely the wrongful death lawsuits they deserve. If it needs to be dependable, you go wired. Despite the advent of WMM and other schemes, wireless LAN technologies have been, are, and will always be best effort only. Anyone who thinks otherwise can't tell their BSSID from their RSSI.
Wow.. wifi in wards? The local one goes apeshit if they even see a mobile phone switched on on the wards, or any electrical device.. you'll be ejected if you don't switch it off immediately - that that's not on the critical wards either.
The only internet access is through their overpriced and shitty 'patient line' (which thankfully was completely broken when my wife was last in hospital, as it was £30 a day and that mounts up over a couple of weeks).
I've quietly scanned a few times and there's no 2.4ghz or 5ghz anywhere even in outpatients, or at least nothing obvious.. they could be using a proprietary protocol of course.
Hahahahahaha! I agree with you absolutely 100%. As someone who manages a Hospital wireless network. However that doesn't take into account clinical requirements for mobility, medical devices at patient bedside, critical heart monitors etc... that we need to accomodate and make work wirelessly.
As it happens, it can work very well (and does). You just need to invest properly in a top notch wireless network infrastructure, subject to full RF survey etc... beforehand. We use a solution that automatically bypasses interfering networks (and can identify whether the interferer is a rogue AP, XBox, Microwave oven etc...). In case anyone is interested, it's a Cisco CleanAir solution but there are loads of others out there.
But (and it's a big one - insert your own joke here) for most of these systems there is a wired backup, it's just more inconvenient for the clinical staff to use and takes more time away from patient care.
Yes, I've broken my own rule on not commenting on something directly related to my job but, hey, it's Christmas.
there was a time I visited the USA two or three times a year, then it became two, then one because travelling there is such a hateful experience. Very long lines at immigration, then queuing again through more security, being x-rayed, being fingerprinterd, being treated like a criminal.
And I suspect I am lucky as I am a typical western white male and less likely to be racially profiled and thus singled out for extra attention. Last year I didn't go at all.
Total cost to the US economy just for me about $3000 per trip, so up to $9000 a year lost. And I know I am far from the only one.
I've thought of visiting the States in the past, but there's no way I'm going to go there whilst I'm treated as a Terrorist suspect simply for wanting to do so!
Meanwhile, of course, the real terrorists are laughing their socks off at the way they've got Uncle Sam dancing to their tune...
The moment when such "petitions" are even considered for a millisecond instead of being dismissed by the relevant authority in their sleep as they should be, the fight is lost. Then it just becomes a matter of proposing it again and again and again in various forms until at some point it passes...
If the hotels get permission to boot people off a network that the hotel doesn't own, thereby breaking the computer misuse act (or it's equivalent) - then I see no reason for hotels to complain if some people decide to return the favour - and continuously boot all hotel customers off the hotel network. I also see no reason why the mobile phone companies can't sue the hotels - since as a paying customer of my mobile network, including the ability to tether, then the hotels are interfering with a service I am paying for.
The painful reality is that there is limited channel space and in a convention hotel there can be literally be hundreds of people competing for a limited slice of channel time. And if I pay the hotel for access to their network and maybe pay a premium for access to the higher speeds and I don't realize the benefit of what I paid for, I'm going to be pretty pissed.
Question for the wireless protocol experts, if 100 people are on a wireless network, and 100 people set up individual Mi-Fi hotspots, do all 200 people have equal access?
Er, surely then I just make sure I have a USB cable for tethering? Will the same one that I use for charging the phone (as works on all modern EU phones) work?
Or is it time to bring back infrared between phone and laptop?
Let's see them try to mess with those.
I would be tempted to phone up, book a room (with the right to cancel) then call them up the day before to check something, and "discover" they charge for wifi and cancel the reservation.
If enough people did that regularly, they might change their policy.
Having stayed at several Marriott hotels throughout the U.S., I can say in general the nicer the hotel is, the fewer services you will receive for free. In addition to wifi, there's breakfast, parking, local calls, and essentially no television channels to chose from. As a business traveler though, I was able to expense these costs. But now attempting to block hotspots is going over the top.
US Television?
I'll pass thanks. It is all just programme breaks between endless adverts.
On my last two trips to the US (4+ weeks covering 10+ states) I didn't turn the TV on once.
If they want to start charging for the TV then that's fine by me as long as I can opt out of it especially the Hotels own channel of inane pap.
We spent a night in a Four Seasons in the US on honeymoon. They wanted $7 for the (not very fancy) printed map of the local area that was left in the room (i.e it was a minibar item). There was no tea/coffee provided in the room, although you could of course order it on room service at suitably expensive prices. We were left wondering what you actually get for your greatly inflated room rate, given that the whole experience compared very poorly to the other (cheaper) hotels on the trip.
I won't even get on to their wifi cost, in a city with ubiquitous free coverage.
Upmarket hotels are money extraction machines, or at least they want to be.
It is easy to charge through the nose for something like this for business travellers, because they know it'll be expensed. That's why hotels marketed at leisure travel generally offer free wifi.
No different than charging higher ticket prices for flying Monday-Friday, versus weekend stays.
You're staying in the wrong Marriott hotels. I haven't paid for wifi in the sleeping area of a Marriott in at least 10 years. Conference rooms are a whole other story, but that's supposed to be covered by the meeting organizer who rented the room. And yes, back in the day I organized a whole lot of conference meetings at hotels.
Once the hotels have "permission" to interrupt other wireless networks, camp on the footpath outside said hotels with a wifi hotspot. Wait until devices get kicked because the hotel in question is unable to limit their damage to within hotel property, sue them for breach of the computer misuse act, then profit.
Unless they turn all their hotels into Faraday cages, what's to stop the de-auth broadcast from interfering with Joe public on the street, the internet café, or other business next door?
Just wait for the "Willful and Malicious Interference" suits to start flying.
Money grabbing pickpocket icon ->
If they turn the hotels into Faraday cages they're not going to need to spam de-auth broadcasts as the phones won't have signals...which means they can bring back overcharging for calls on the hotel phones - seems win win from their point of view, especially as you can get it in paint form - sure the $1,300 per twenty litres will soon pay for itself...
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