[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Robert Loomans]

> and finally, Google are scumbuckets, they knew fully well what was going on, only they got caught out and had to come public, interception or no interception, what gives those wa...s the right to sniff out ANYTHING, even an SID, they need to be brought to justice here as well, they are in Germany, and IIRC some states in the U.S are taking or considering action, they need to be taught a darn good lesson, globally.

I have little doubt that capturing payload data (encrypted or not) is both ethically and legally a bad idea. No argument there.

I *do* have a doubt that detecting SSIDs and MAC addresses is in the same ballpark. They are publicly broadcast in the clear as part of the protocol: they are the wifi equivalent of street numbers and building/house names visible on the street. If you are not allowed to use that data, then you'd be violating the law every time you opened your laptop, turned on your smartphone, etc and saw a different SSID. Have a look at http://www.skyhookwireless.com/, it's used by Mac OS X, iPhone, various web browsers, etc. and it correlates GPS data and SSIDs and MAC addresses and feeds the results back to the Skyhook servers.

As for "taught a darn good lesson", I don't like that this is typically being said like they want to see a public spanking or a public lynching.

It's almost certain that Google screwed up pretty badly. In that case, they should be prosecuted and penalised.

However, I think that a healthy dose of Hanlon's Razor[1] should be applied: remembering that neither stupidity nor ignorance are excuses for breaking the law. 

Cheers,
   Rob

[1] "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

-- 
Robert Loomans                         email:       robertl at apnic.net
Senior Software Engineer, APNIC        sip:    robertl at voip.apnic.net
http://www.apnic.net/                  phone:         +61 7 3858 3100