Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Jamming personal Wi-Fi

First Marriott, now Hilton. Several complaints has been linked to Hilton hotels blocking personal Wi-Fi and hotspots so guests would be required to pay the exorbitant hotel internet access.  Upon 1 year of the FCC requesting information for its U.S. brand Wi-Fi practices, they are being charged $25K (for starters). Investigation unfolding...
Other related fines on the topic include: Marriott paid $600K to the FCC for a similar case settlement, Smarty City Holdings telecom firm fined $750K, and another to be fined $718K is M.C. Dean at Baltimore Convention Center (for actually deploying deauthentication devices).  There is some level of truth (as asserted in Marriott's response) that interference and signal degradation; or rogue hotspots could be a security issue, but the FCC was crystal clear in its message. But maybe not so clear, as opponents cited, is the established policy around blocking, jamming, etc. of wi-fi...  Hence, isn't there instances when jamming wi-fi could be a benefit or cases of necessity.

Hooray for the Communications Act that prohibit interference with Wi-Fi communications. However, that shouldn’t stop hotels, etc. from snooping your searches or reading anything you transmit over there wi-fi network (excluding encrypted/VPN traffic) which you agree to the terms upon signup. Download any sniffer or port analyzer e.g. Wireshark, then turn on and surf the web.  You’ll be able to capture/see communication exchanges between your machine and destination.  Now picture your machine connected to a switch trunk-port like network administrators or anyone in the wiring closet/Data Center have access to and see the population of connected ports/PCs and traffic generated - which is sometimes logged/archived.

Interestingly enough the FCC standard minimum broadband is 4 Mbps but its Chairman advocates 25 Mbps to be the goal (while current U.S. download averages 11.5 Mbps, according to Akamai). Maybe you stream movies constantly...or perhaps your typing skills is just that fast.  Show me the associated cost!

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