There were some valid point brought forward in the article. First,
don't think this about wholesale theft form wireless carriers; rather,
this is about the erosion of consumer confidence in per-packet billing.
DoCoMo already has a monthly 500yen kickback to consumers that
acknowledges the fact that they don't own and can't control the
Internet. The reality is that there is enough strange and wonderful
stuff going on in the Internet that per-packet billing is tenuous at
best.
...and for all those telcos and governments out there who's revenue
models depending on per-(whatever besides monthly) billing, that has
huge implications. These folks consider a departure from per-packet
billing to be theft outright.
Mika Tuupola wrote:
>
> On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Nick May wrote:
>
> > Presumably one would have to hack into the internal network to get
> > access to the (private?) i.p addresses that are being assigned to
> > customers. (Or are they not private - can I ping them from the net?)
> [...]
> The overbilling scam they described is basically just
> pinging a host (handset) in Internet.
>
> In the old days when ISP:s charged by the traffic you
> could do the same "attack" to some poor company by
> floodpinging their webserver. Was that called "hacking
> into ISP billing system"? I dont think so :)
>
> --
> Mika Tuupola http://www.appelsiini.net/~tuupola/
>
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Received on Sun Oct 5 08:07:32 2003