On Tue, 13 Aug 1996, Ben Combee wrote:
Yes, it has already happened, although in a slightly different context. The Georgia Tech campus dormatories got wired with Ethernet back in 1994, and there was quite a rush by the sizable geek
The graduate residences at Stanford were built with 10Base2 in 1986, and 50% of the undergrad dorms were wired with 10BaseT by 1993. So there.
population to get dorm rooms in the buildings slated to get installation first. It worked out quite well, especially the privacy aspects, as the dorm routers encrypted all packets so only the intended Ethernet node could receive it (at least that is what they said).
The "secure hubs" at GATech don't do encryption -- no way could that be done at wire speed. What they do is fill the data portion of the Ethernet packet with nulls. Everyone gets to see the source and destination MAC address and length of every packet, but only the recipient (or a very clever spoofer -- most of the "secure hubs" on the market have a few vulnerabilities) gets the data. If you run a packet sniffer, all you get are CRC errors (in order to maintain wire speed, the non-destination ports don't compute one). As far as real-world geek apartments go, I heard of one in Manhattan that worked exactly as described. I don't know whether they run "secure hubs." Presumably they would -- I can't think of a major manufacturer's manageable 10BaseT hub that lacks MAC address lockout features. OTOH, I've heard tell that several of the residential coax experiments run promiscuously. Everything your neighbor does online, you can see with the right software. -rich