Re: Admission Control to the IETF 78 and IETF 79 Networks

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Ole Jacobsen wrote:
> 
> > "I have been told that an IETF meeting does not have security guards 
> > at the door to verify who has a badge to determine whether the person 
> > is registered for the meeting.
> 
> > "The fashion in the IETF is to have an open network. There isn't any 
> > admission control and credentials are not required to enjoy the 
> > benefit of free and full Internet access. The IETF may run out of 
> > cookies; it never runs out of bandwidth."
> 
>  I would have to disagree. You were probably not even born when we 
>  had real terminal rooms with real terminals and computers and mean
>  looking security guards who very much did check badges.

I do remember the guarded terminal rooms in 1995-1998.  But
while the access to the room was guarded and badges were checked,
there was no monitoring or logging what you were doing at the
"terminals" (=PCs) or on your laptop that you attached to on
of the RJ-45 plugs.

Is there no more Terminal room on IETF these days with LAN access,
where access to the area is monitored but access to the network
is not de-anonymized?

The use of WLAN started out with a small group of early adopters
somewhere around 1996/1997.  IIRC someone working for Digital brought
along a small number of WLAN Adapters (pretty large, I believe PCMCIA-based)
and some folks taped it on the back of the lid of their laptops.


I'm not sure that the liability issues for open WLANs have been
correctly described here.  IANAL and I'm german, and the IETF
meeting is in the Netherlands.

If the meeting was in German and the IAOC wanted to obtain signed
voluntary(!) consent agreements from IETF particpants for collecting
personalized network traffic characteristics (e.g. DHCP leases),
before giving them network access credentials, then they would need
to ensure that these network access credentials can be individually
revoked at any time, because the consent agreement will be individually
revokable at any time, after which not more logging of that persons
traffic is permitted...

-Martin