[EuroPython] Wifi pre-registration now online

[Giovanni Bajo]

On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 18:41 +0200, Thomas Waldmann wrote:
> > Due to really silly Italian regulations,
> 
> Agreed! :)
> 
> >  we are forced to identify and register every person that uses the
> > free wifi connection at EuroPython. Please head to the wifi
> > information page to read all the details.
> 
> Well, there are some issues with that:
> 
> a) most visitors from abroad don't have an italian SIM
> 
> b) quite some maybe don't have a credit card (or maybe don't want to
> give it for that purpose)
> 
> c) ComCom wants you to agree to 3 longish terms in italian language,
> which most people from abroad won't even be able to read/understand.
> There is a button at the top right to switch to English, but that does
> not change the language of the terms.

We found out about this too late in the game, and at that point ComCom
refused to provide a legal translation for those terms.

Would it be any better if we provided a non-binding/non-legal
translation of those terms on our website? I can see if we can find a
few cycles to do that.

> So I guess you should be prepared to have quite a lot of people at your
> conference wifi registration point.

ComCom will handle them, and I had already warned them :)

> Also, what is the point of that registration? It looks like it only
> would make "sense" if they (ComCom) log everything you do on the
> internet and store that log (for how long?).

Yes, that's the point. The whole traffic is tunneled through VPN on
their servers, and they log the traffic at the NAT/connection-level and
associate it with the login, and then put it out through their public IP
range. All ISPs in Italy are required to do the same (unless they have 1
IP per person, which most do, at which point it's easier since they just
need logs to show assignments between end-users and the dynamic IPs).

So when the police will see that IP 1.2.3.4 (in ComCom's public range)
at 12:45pm have connected to a terrorist website, they will directly go
to ComCom, and ComCom is prepared to show them a log of who was actually
doing that connection.

(I'm trying to be serious while I'm writing the above paragraph, but
hilarity obviously ensues; I'll refrain from posting political comments
on our government and their understanding of technology)

Article 4 in the longer agreement roughly says that the log is
absolutely private and will be shown only to police, and that is kept as
long as current Italian laws forces them to do. I've double-checked the
law and it's 4 years.

> That internet access via wifi, is it completely open or filtered
> somehow? ssh will work?

100% open. SSH will work. It's behind a NAT, so you can't run servers on
it. Each user is fully isolated so that it cannot communicate to anybody
else (so you actually need a USB pendrive to copy files to someone else,
or roundtrip through the public Internet).

Please notice that, for trainings and sprints, we plan to have at least
1 ethernet cable per person, and connection through ethernet is a
totally different network that does not require identification nor
registration. Plug the cable, dhcp, and there you go.

I am really sorry for these troubles. Our number one goal has been to
partner with a company that we technically trusted as to build a working
wifi network. We know how amateur-made wifi networks can be at
conferences, and we do in fact trust ComCom to deliver a reliable wifi
network. 

We cannot help much with Italian regulations, and we didn't have enough
cycles to further integrate with them and to soften edges in the
registration process (eg: sharing europython.eu registration with them,
providing a way to upload an ID as an alternative preregistration path,
etc.).
-- 
Giovanni Bajo