I'm off to Stanford to speak at tomorrow's conference, Securing Privacy in the Internet Age, where I'll talk about how ID cards can help, and hurt, privacy.
I gather there won't be WiFi at the event, so blogging may be lighter than usual until I return to Miami late on Monday.
I went to Stanford’s Spectrum Policy conference last year and they had wifi access. You just had to register your MAC address to get on the network. Some people had trouble getting connected so David Sifrey busted out a sputnik access point and took care of the problem.
I hope you are right….but the conference materials warn, “7. You are welcome to bring your computers to the conference, but we can not provide internet access.”
They may have changed things. I think we turned our MAC’s in with our registration, but I was working as a volunteer in order to get around the fee. At my school we just migrated from a completely open wireless network put together with off the shelf WAP’s to the over-all campus network and some nice commercial routers that allow MAC filtering. One of the things I worry about is being able to get people on the network without having to go through quite a bit of hassle. It would be nice if folks could walk into the library and register their MAC’s, but the campus IT dept. doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to give us that sort of control. You might email the Stanford IT folks and see if they will let you on the network while you are there?