Comment by FridayoLeary
4 years ago
Is that some sort of hatch in the pavement? You order something on Prime, and moments later, a slab embossed with Amazons' logo opens, a deliveryperson jumps out and deposits the package into your outstretched arm.
Almost. It's anyone with Amazon IoTs sharing wifi with each other.
It's ambient network access, a desirable behaviour which I anticipate our descendants (or their descendants) will take for granted.
Imagine gradually choking as you wait for a friend to open their front door - oops, you forgot their air doesn't know you're allowed to use Oxygen, hope they get here in time to explicitly authorise you to breathe...
Because of the Network Effect the grand total number of Networks you care about will always be... one. So, it doesn't make sense to have a dozen fiercely independent WiFi networks in the same physical volume all of which are, in fact, just offering access to the same network (the Internet) but with separate credentials needed for each.
There have been very slow steps on the obvious way forward here. If you've been a student somewhere civilized in the last couple of decades you might have seen EduRoam. Under EduROAM your credentials from say, the University of Florida, or Stanford work at MIT and NYU, but also in Oxford, and in Tokyo. No more need to maintain separate "guest" networks so that the visiting lecturer's laptop works. But most of us, most of the time, are using dozens of little pointless fiefdoms.
Right, but do you want that one network to be run by a single company called Amazon?
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You will still have to identity particular users, because you want to sell access, because you want to identity those who break the rules and attack other users. But most importantly, users want to separate their networks from one another.
OTOH the technology can move from private radios to the model of cellular networks, where you don't care which tower you connect to, and the security / authorization lives at a different level.
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