Cory --

Sitting at home with a stack of AOL CDs will get you burned in little-to-no time, unless you are consistently changing phonelines. When you run the setup, it dials the WATS line at AOL to validate you and get local numbers.

When AOL see four of five separate validates on the same phone number (and, as a WATS line, they get ANI service, which means they get the phone number, regardless of what you do (since they're paying for the phonecall)) they'l cut you off. When they see the traffic to port 25, they'll cut you off. Spammers are giving up on using AOL dialup accounts as feeds, because there are easier ways. Like using random WiFi accounts.

Spammer *do* driveby. I've seen it happen, having to get on the phone for clients to explain to thier ISP's how all that spam came from their netblock, and no, how it wouldn't happen again, as I'm busying firewalling and WEPing the WiFi hubs that the logs *clearly* showed were the source of the spam. Not just once, mind you, three or four times.

Remember -- the terms of service are between you and your ISP. If Joe Spammer grabs your WiFi, then it's your fault.

This sort of thing will almost certainly kill open WiFi in the end -- and if NearlyNet expects to actually work in the long run, it's going to have to deal with the problem. Which, alas, is typical of the net. A few abusers ruin everything.