Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Legal responsibilities for hotspot- The Debate Continues On

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 03:44:05 -0400

Legal Responsibilities For Hotspot Owners
Contributed by mmasnick on Mon, Aug 4 2003

Julian Bond is wondering what are the legal responsibilities for hotspot owners,
pointing out that Wayport and T-Mobile effectively offer open email relays in
order to make it easier for their users to send out email. Of course, the obvious
answer is that, right now, I don't think they have any legal responsibilities,
since they're just acting as a service provider. Of course, that doesn't
necessarily mean they shouldn't think more carefully about what they should offer.

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Legal responsibilities for hotspot- The Debate Continues On
owners
by Julian Bond on 02/08/03 - 09:07
Julian Bond's blog | 2
comments

Here's one to worry about. What legal responsibilities do hotspot owners have for
activity conducted by their customers?
This is prompted by the discovery that Wayport run an open email server for their
customers and T-Mobile intercept email destined for other servers and route it via
their own email server (I think). Both of these are reactions to a real need for
their hotspot customers to send email. But both are effectively open relays with
no authentication. How much information and logging do they really have in place
to positively identify the customer?

The real answer here is for the mainstream ISPs to support SSL and STMP-AUTH so
that their paid up customers have access to email services no matter how or where
they connect to the internet. At home, work or from a hotspot. Until then hotspot
providers need to provide some solution so that hotspot users can send email. But
just giving blanket access to anyone using the hotspot is not the answer.

http://wifi.ecademy.com/node.php?id=9716

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