Tag: wifi

Free Starbucks Wifi

Prediction: Starbucks will start rolling out free Wifi access within 1 year. In fact, Starbucks is already offering free Wifi, in a way. If you want to use iTunes with your iPhone to buy the music you hear being piped over the Starbucks speakers, you don’t need to pay for a T-Mobile account to do so.

duh.

Hotspot@Home

To use the service just pop your T-Mobile SIM into the phone and connect to your WiFi network. If you’re using T-Mobile’s router, you have one button access to secure and encrypt the connection. That’s it. Once you have connected, your calls will be routed over WiFi and you’ll suddenly find your phone works in places of your home that it didn’t work before. Your talk time will still come out of your minutes plan however. But that’s not all. For an extra $9.99 a month (that’s an introductory rate but will be grandfathered in so you won’t see a rate increase over time) every call you make over WiFi (in the US) is now free.

timid. they are not cannibalizing themselves fast enough. guess someone else will do it for them.

We-Fi

Our goal is to make open Wifi act more like a wireless infrastructure that can compete with 3G networks, except freely created and shared by the users. We want to be able to get on fast, free Wifi wherever we go, so we’re building the tools to make that possible. Today we are releasing the first version of our client that replaces the wireless connection manager in Windows. It tests all the networks around you and automatically connects you to the best one. Metrics about all the access points users see are reported to our server, and we show them on a map, so you can see where there is open Wifi coverage – updated constantly, in real time, by the WeFi users.

any headway into the fearmongering surrounding open wifi is good. Tests all the networks around you and automatically connects you to the best one. Metrics about all the access points users see are reported to our server, and we show them on a map.

WiFi slurper

The Slurpr is a giant, homemade WiFi access-point that uses several WiFi cards to grab all the open networks it can see and combines them into a single Internet feed for your network.

want one. plus, how about a little patch to disable all that WPA and associated silliness?

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!