[LINK] google misdeeds and Australia's Privacy Commissioner

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 09:29:27PM +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> It is pretty straightforward: it's at least ill-mannered (and possibly 
> illegal) to decide that possession of a sniffer confers the right to 
> look at other peoples' networks. 

it's not at all straight-forward. and as i said in my previous message,
it's not "other people's networks", it's "shared spectrum".

> That's all I'm saying, and I can't see why it's an offensive
> statement.

what's objectonable is the implicit assumption that having or running
a network sniffer is in any way unusual or inherently wrong. it's not.
what's even more objectionable is that by leaving such assumptions
unchallenged, the chance of such tools being outlawed increases
slightly.

diagnosing network problems(*) would be near impossible without them.
they're essential tools. you can't find and fix problems if you can't
see what's happening.



(*) including such simple things as "why the hell does my home wifi
network crap out at around 7pm almost every night?.....[run kismet or
other sniffer]...oh. looks like one of my neighbours watches the news
over his wifi tv-repeater...maybe i should change my network to another
channel". and then leave kismet running for a few days to gather enough
data to find out which channels seem to have the least traffic at the
times i'm most likely to be using my network.

that's just one example amongst thousands of problems that would be
impossible to diagnose without a sniffer.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>