Category Archives: Wireless

Robert Kaye On Endless Community Jukebox In The Sky

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Wireless == great jukebox in the sky?

While aggregated wireless music collections won’t provide everything to everyone everywhere, they do have some interesting qualities that are worth exploring.
If the community around you has the music, do you need to download all of the music to your machine? Better get another bigger harddrive, because the community will have more music than you have harddrive space. So, I hope that people will truely start sharing their collections instead of actually copying them as the current file sharing networks do. And if we’re just sharing and not copying does that fall under fair use? (Never mind that fair use has been erradicated in the last few years).

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Liberation Spectrum – Sci Fi To Live By

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So parts of this stuff I’d like to see happen — and the rest of it is probably just going to happen anyway…
Cory Doctorow has gives new meaning to the term “Liberation Radio”:
Liberation spectrum

The roadhouse was the kind of TAZ that got less entertaining by the second. Lee-Daniel stood in the blinking vegaslights for an eternity while he authenticated to the roadhouse-area-network, surrounded by generic ads while the giant vending machine figured out who he was and what to sell him. Once the wall spat out his token — poker chips adorned with grinning, dancing anthropomorphic dollar, euro and yen symbols — the walls around him leapt to delighted life, pitching their wares hard. He struggled with the rest of the corporation to make out the actual nature of the products behind the pitch and locate a tuna-melt and wave his chip at it.
The sandwich appeared in a slot by his feet and when he bent to fetch it, he was bombarded with upsell ads set into the floor tiles: “Lee-Daniel! People who bought tuna-melts also bought thousand-hour power cells. People who bought OralCare mouth kits also bought MyGuts brand edible oscopycams. People who bought banana-melatonin rice-shakes also bought tailormade sailcloth shirts by Figaro’s of London and Rangoon.”

Werbach On Open Spectrum

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Spectrum Wants to Be Free
Never pay for phone, cable, or net access again
By Kevin Werbach for Wired.

In an open spectrum world, wireless transmitters would be as ubiquitous as microprocessors: in televisions, cars, public spaces, handheld devices, everywhere. They would tune themselves to free spectrum and self-assemble into networks. Anyone could become a radio broadcaster reaching millions. Phone calls would rarely need to pass through central networks; they would be handed off and relayed across devices, for free or nearly so. Businesses would track far-flung assets in real time via embedded sensors. Big TV networks and cable operators would lose their hammerlock control over media distribution. Entrepreneurs would develop as yet undreamed of applications that we can’t live without. It happens any time open platforms emerge – think eBay and Amazon.com…
When spectrum licensing was established in the early 20th century, radios were primitive, as was the regulatory model used to govern them. To be heard, broadcasters needed an exclusive slice of spectrum. Today, however, digital technologies let many users occupy the same frequency at the same time. As the FCC’s Powell points out, “Modern technology has fundamentally changed the nature and extent of spectrum use.” Today’s devices employ advanced digital signal processing and other techniques, and they’re smart enough to coexist without interference.

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The Truth About Open Spectrum

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Here’s a great article by Sarah Lai Stirland for the Seattle Times that explains the truth about the amazing consumer benefits of wireless and the fallacy of spectrum scarcity:
Open-spectrum advocates say it will boost technology
(via BoingBoing)

The core of this idea is the belief that, if the rules are tweaked the right way, technology companies in the next five years will have brought to market the equipment that will make the notion of electromagnetic-spectrum scarcity, a fundamental issue of telecom economics, seem quaint.
Equipment makers would create devices that would intelligently navigate through the congested airwaves

Community Wireless At SFSU

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I’m hanging out in the Student Union here at San Francisco State University before speaking to the Broadcast Electronic Communications Arts (BECA) 200 class (as I do every fall).
I’ve connected to a wireless network simply titled “bogus.”
Free, universal access rules!

War Driving Has Become Out Dated – Time for Peace Driving

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How nice to see an article come clean with the real reason for all this fuss about Wardriving: to sell people an overpriced solution.

But to computer-security experts, “war-driving” has turned into a marketing opportunity. Past war drives embarrassed a number of companies, and in preparation for the big event this weekend, some of these experts have been pitching their services.
This week, for example, International Business Machines Corp. has been urging sales representatives to warn corporate clients of the need to secure their wireless networks. The merchandising tie-in: Your network can be safeguarded by an IBM security service that goes for $15,000 to $30,000.

However, it was still rather sad to see the rest of the usual inaccurate bullshit about Wardriving that is always included in these articles.
Hackers target wireless networks
By William M. Bulkeley
Hopefully I’ll have time to clarify this puppy in greater detail over the weekend — it really, really needs to be done. While explaining this whole concept of taking connectivity without asking for it — they’re leaving out the payback:
free universal connectivity!
So yeah, some guy walking down the street can get his email with his PDA while he walks by my house FOR FREE! And I can do the same while I’m walking by his house. How cool is that!?
Or how’d you like to check your email/surf the web while you’re waiting for the Bus (that’s always late), or waiting for that band to come on, or waiting to hear about that one business deal while you’re in the waiting room about to make another. All that kind of stuff can happen cheaply — in a way that everyone can afford — using community wireless networks.
And your schools and libraries all have connectivity because it’s just there.
This universal connectivity is what this kind of paranoid propaganda is fighting against. They want us to have to pay somebody for it somewhere, every time we connect, every time we use a different device, everytime we access an application even.
If we work together, we can just pay what we’re already paying for at home and have easy wireless connectivity away from home, when we often need it most for whatever device we have around at the time, wherever we happen to find ourselves.
If big business wants to provide a wireless network that’s cheaper and easier to use, let it. It will have to charge reasonable prices however, if it has community networks competing with it.
We don’t need a World Wide Wardriving day — every day is World Wide Wardriving Day. We need a better word for it — one without “war” in it.
Perhaps that was the first mistake.
Or perhaps a community-based movement has evolved since then —
a Peace Driving movement.
Perhaps I’ve said to much 🙂

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What the FBI Doesn’t Get (About Wireless Security)

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A week or two ago, the FBI got freaked out about wireless networks.
Their conclusions were confused, at best. Luckily Paul Holman, Theodore Pham,
Merin McDonell, and Skyler Fox had a nice mailing list thread to help put everything into perspective.
Thanks to Paul, Theodore, Merin, and Skyler for giving me permission to publish this email exchange in-tact.

(Theodore Pham) Say I forget my wallet containing my credit cards in a restaurant. Wardriving/warchalking is essentially posting a sign saying my wallet is sitting their out in the open and it contains credit cards. That signage in and of itself is NOT THEFT. But the moment someone uses my credit cards without my specific permission IS THEFT. My credit cards should NOT be
considered a public resource just because I FORGOT to put my wallet back in
my pocket out of public access.

(Merin McDonell) I think your wallet analogy is wrong. I think an apple tree is better. You have a nice big apple tree in your back yard and the apples fall in your neighbors yard and in the alley. Is it a crime if people eat the apples that
are on the ground and off your property? If you DON’T want anyone to eat any
of the apples that grew on your tree, if for some reason you need all 347
apples, you could trim your tree so that all the branches end right on your
property line and all of the apples would fall in your yard. Done.

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Informit’s Dumb Article On Wardriving

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These guys confuse just about every issue surrounding “wardriving” and wireless. The point of “wardriving” isn’t to hack the networks you find — just to use them.
If wardriving were a bad thing, why would people be warchalking to let others know where their networks were.
It’s like the twilight zone or something. These guys are living in their own reality — one of hype and misinformation.
Anyway here’s the story by Frank Fiore and Jean Francois:
Unwitting Collaborators, Part 6: Wireless Insecurity.

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