tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16688455.post419697866836413310..comments2024-03-18T09:13:19.346+00:00Comments on panGloss: ZDNet, Wi Fi and the Digital Economy Billpanglosshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00900934369744270540noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16688455.post-11279520997622151642009-12-01T12:45:40.595+00:002009-12-01T12:45:40.595+00:00"According to legal advice sent to The Cloud ..."According to legal advice sent to The Cloud by the law firm Faegre & Benson on 17 August, 'Wi-Fi hotspots in public and enterprise environments providing access to the internet to members of the public, free or paid, are public communications services'."<br /><br />Maybe they would also say the same applies to what we do providing comms and mail to our students and staff. Its not all automatic depending on jobs or courses - there are some students who can choose to pay extra to get more access. That is probably the case for lots of UK universities.<br /><br />I'm also worried about malicious claims to copyright being used to harass legitimate users or owners. There are some nasty, clever, people out there. There are - believe it or not Lord Mandelson - nasty clever people who do nasty clever things with computers or networks purely to upset other people and cause trouble. <br /><br />The kind of people who send us endless torrents of phishing spam (or who leave the software that sends it running on bots long after they have forgotten about it and moved on to the next scam) can and probably will find some way to make mischief, or profit, by sending well-faked complaints. <br /><br />The complaints we see at the moment (probably more than one a week) almost always originate from software. They are sent to us automatically. No real human lawyer types them in and decides to send them to us - some computer program notices that an old Chuck Norris film seems to be available from such-and-such and address and zaps off a nastygram to the registered owners of the domain, and their ISPs. Those channels can be exploited by the bad guys.Ken Brownhttp://ken.wibsite.comnoreply@blogger.com