Month: February 2007

Snow hacking

Those who make snow are proud of their powder. They speak passionately about its stacking qualities (it is denser than snow that starts out in a cloud) and bandy about terms like nucleation and wet bulb temperature. Forums like snowguns.com, which has over 3700 members, show a subculture as much into the process of snowmaking as the result of it. There are discussions about how to build your own rope tow and lengthy back-and-forths about the attributes of various snow wand nozzles. “When real snow falls, my daughter thinks I made it.'”

Germany Media Luddites

Mathias was able to download a complete copy of a current German bestselling book, which was quite delicate considering the company behind VTO supported a lawsuit against Google Book Search because Google allegedly didn’t protect well against the downloading of book texts. But maybe that’s the core of the problem: they want to compete against a tech company (Google) in a technical space (the web), but they’re non-technical themselves, possibly lacking the means to judge the quality of the outsourced work

WIFI NAS

what’s special about DAVE? One thing is size. The guts of it are about the size of a 1 cm thick credit card. How about 10-20 gigabytes of storage. Cooler. Now get this, files are transmitted to and from it wirelessly.

ah, wireless NAS. that is kinda cool

Wifi Paranoia

Vancouver’s cops have espoused vague, technologically ignorant objections to city-wide WiFi. They argue that the ability to communicate anonymously will help criminals (cough pay-phones cough) and that WiFi is all about people stealing each others’ connectivity.

this is really the vendors / media fault. all this BS talk about how you have to use WPA now comes home to roost.
2007-05-31:

A Michigan man was arrested for accessing a coffee shop’s public Wifi hotspot. He was charged with a felony and faced up to 5 years in jail, but he took an offer of “paying a $400 fine, doing 40 hours of community service and staying on probation for 6 months.”

fucking technophobes are ruining everything.
2007-09-12:

This is the other reason I believe that uninhibited piggybacking is not completely without harm / consequences. If we want those networks to get built we have to understand that unlimited network sharing has to carry some consequences. That’s why it is probably necessary to find ways to deter the most egregious uses. Again, no one has any real problem with a little casual use at the margins, but my point here is that not everything takes place at the margin on a “casual” basis. Some piggybacking activities impose real costs and could result in real harm. That harm might be direct to the user in the form of rising monthly bills, termination of service, or computer corruption / other privacy loses. Alternatively, that harm could be longer-term and more indirect in nature, as would be the case if broadband operators refused to provide next-generation services for fear of the inability to recoup the significant sunk investments it entails.

it is inane people like this guy who are ruining it for everyone.
2007-10-02:

fighting the good fight against wifi spoilsports.
2007-12-04:

The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wifi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300k.

WTF? this “but think of the children” bullshit is getting way of hand when it is transparent what is going on here: open hotspots are threatening entrenched telco interests.
2008-01-09:

Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea

+1!