[MLB-WIRELESS] Fw: Internet Sharing

[Toliman]

At 06:38 PM 16/02/2003, you wrote:
>Donovan Baarda wrote:
>         [..]
> > All you need is a document saying "we promise nothing"

much to the chagrin of meeting organisers, who actually deliver on that 
promise ...

j/k.

the idea of a community is rather disparate, we tend to live in isolated 
areas and the opportunity to combine resources is rare. When groups of 
people do live in close proximity, it is well appreciated when there are 
people in the vicinity who can help. This does not mean that melb-wireless 
does nothing except help a few people, it means we operate more like a 
society than an impactful interlinked community of users. that said, we can 
support infrastructure in the event that LAN's become multi-linked WAN's 
and that there is a strategy that will be encouraged, discussed, planned 
and enabled before that fateful day arrives.

( like an apocalypse, only with more leeching.)

I like to think of community infrastructure building as a work-in-progress 
that only ever motivates itself when people find a reason to act on that 
impulse, discuss it, torture the idea and the participants of the working 
groups, then release it into the wider group for acceptance; a possible 
reason why i abstain from providing constructive criticism.

>... and we'd find ourselves discussing a scenario that is rather
>different to the speculation of my original email, viz. that any
>offering of IP QoS has, to be meaningful in any sense of the word, promise
>something. i'd be interested in getting the ACA to clarify how it
>would intend to interpret such a situation.
>
>(take a trivial example: I offer free 802.11 access to my cable modem,
>i use some new-fangled AP with DiffServ or 802 priority queuing capabilities,
>and promise one neighbor s/he'll get 80% of my cablemodem's link capacity
>[using some mutually agreed definition of 'capacity']. now there's a promise
>with regard to the over-the-air part of the link. i'm curious if anyone
>has posed this sort of situation to the ACA to get a clear answer...)

if ... you make your neighbour, or yourself, sign an agreement to use your 
internet connection, and that you guarantee to let her use up to 80% of the 
capacity at any time, then later on, you kick her off because you want to 
play "Yahoo Bridge 2003", you would probably be in legal strife since you 
agree to let her have 80% at any time. etc.

Those "Terms and Conditions" you are supposed to agree with when you join 
an ISP tend to have a few good clauses about that kind of stuff. Your ISP 
may also want to know why you let him/her use your internet when they 
assigned all responsibility to the primary account holder for any use or 
misuse of the connection.  This also accounts for any "Drive-By" usage that 
you don't have prior agreement / awareness of -- your ISP will not accept 
responsibility for your PC being used in a NASA website hack / defacement, 
but your account, and you, being the account holder, will be.

... i would also include the ubiquitous "we decide if and when to kick you 
off without negotiation or consultation" clause. always handy.

The ACA would be the least of your problems, your ISP would be/should be 
asked, they will likely provide you with clauses that highlight the 
disowning of their liability, and emphasize your new liability as a 
Carriage Provider (non-profit). The ACA might even have a brochure on it, 
something like ...

"So you've decided to become a Carriage Provider... What do i need to do to 
avoid being sued ?"
"The Zen Art of reading ACA Legal Definitions"
"Free Speech, Free Beer, Free Internet -- Which one is more likely to get 
you in trouble in Australia"

Toliman.

>cheers,
>gja
>--
>Grenville Armitage
>http://caia.swin.edu.au


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