Surely people can break p****y laws and not get caught by going into a cafe that has free wifi, is this true?

Question

In the UK ISPs have recently been cracking down on internet p****y which is fair enough, as far as I am aware they do this by finding out your ISP address and sending you a letter, but surely people will just go into wifi hotspots such as a cafe, download stuff, and then the cafe will get a letter even if they are blameless?

Answer 1

Firstly, it's uploaders that they're targetting, not downloaders. The only people getting letters are those who consistently upload data on file-sharing services, or who use services like BitTorrent where you absolutely have to upload as well as download. You won't get a letter just for downloading files using LimeWire or whatever.

The dilemma is an interesting one though, as it would not realistically be possible to trace the illegal usage back to an individual cafe customer. It would certainly not be feasible to trace it back to you using your MAC address, even if this address was unique to you, which in fact it isn't. Unlike old wired network cards, modern wireless cards don't have fixed MAC addresses, and the address can easily be changed using software (this is known as MAC spoofing).

A more realistic scenario is that cafes will learn to block any sites or services that may get them into hot water. Burger King already announce (rather proudly) that their wifi service is filtered.

Answer 2

sounds good, but the cafe would have a log of the unique mac address of your computer's network card though, with what you did on their network and when - so you're not as anonymous as you'd like to think.

Answer 3

I don't know if time shifting is legal in the UK, like recording on vcr or tape from tv or radio and playing that later.  But it is in the US and for the digital age you might want to look into something like this http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/

Find Radio stations at

www.shoutcast.net

Good Luck!!!

Answer 4

Well, to an extent, you have a point. If it gets to something that is really serious. Like Hacking and harrassing, and stuff that is a completely HUGE cyber crime...Then the cafe wouldnt' be held responsible. First what they would do, is they(they as in fbi in america, or government) would find the mac adress of that computer, not the local ip adress, but the actuall mac adress, then they would track thaty person down. Usually though, this wouldnt happen, because governments have a lot of better things to do then to chase down cyber criminals.

Answer 5

The cafe will have to hand over the log from their router in this event,  which will show your Mac address(the uniqueidentifier for your wireless network card,) which can be traced back to you if they REALLY wanted to... it would be costly and time consuming.... why not just proxy instead?