security concerns

A friend of mine is running a small cocktail bar at the lower east side of Frankfurt/Germany. Until June he provided free Wifi-access to his customers. One day some folks flocked into his place, had some coffees and sucked a lot of mp3-music through the bars network onto their laptops. He took for shure they used his IP-adress to contact closely watched servers from the peer to peer scene. So he shut down his access point. Did he wrong?

Re: security concerns

[quote author=“buzzin55”]A friend of mine is running a small cocktail bar at the lower east side of Frankfurt/Germany. Until June he provided free Wifi-access to his customers. One day some folks flocked into his place, had some coffees and sucked a lot of mp3-music through the bars network onto their laptops. He took for shure they used his IP-adress to contact closely watched servers from the peer to peer scene. So he shut down his access point. Did he wrong?

Probably, unless the WiFi was actually attracting the wrong kind of customer in large numbers, driving away the customers he wants.

He just needs to change from free and open WiFi to a small amount of control. Just as: one day some customers might assault each other with chairs and glasses. Plastic cups and no seats would not be a good response to the worry of this recurring.

Instead of open access, give a one-time half hour user name and password. Include a terms-of-use consent at log-in. I’m sure there are specialist providers that will set this up for him, including MAC address logging, protocol/port blocking/throttling etc. The waiter just peels off a sticker and gives it to the customer. This also has the important side effect of creating perceived value to the WiFi, and creating an interaction that helps build a customer relationship.

I don’t know how many percentage of the total western population is on_travel at any giver point of time. But this percentage will certainly not stop growing any time soon. We will not accept being out of web-reach during these periods. And we will not either accept being out of office facilities with meeting facilities during these periods.

Starbucks is a fine office and meeting place if their WiFi was free. Just this month McDonald’s, via The Cloud (UK based), offers free WiFi access in the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Norway restaurants. Local operators being thrown out of the picture (in DK, SE, NO)

We don’t turn out the street lights because a couple drug deals are done there. Bad move to cut out the service. We can’t live our lives afraid of the bad guys.