The latest from the Embarrassing Florida News Department: Police arrested a man in St. Petersburg, Florida for briefly using an open wi-fi access point in a public place.
The clueless cops charged Benjamin Smith III with "unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony," according to the St. Petersburg Times.
Every day thousands of people do what this poor guy did. And they have no idea they're felons. I'll wager that most wi-fi users think that if a hotspot in a public place is open (i.e., if it announces its presence to the world via SSID broadcast and it's not WEP encrypted or password protected), using it to access the Internet is legal and ethical. Such use is common practice.
The St. Petersburg Times article about this arrest belongs in the National Enquirer. It refers to Smith's off-the-shelf wi-fi use as "hacking" into a computer network. (Of course the writer makes The Obligatory Greenhorn Tech-Reporter Mistake: use of the term "hacking" to mean "maliciously breaking into a computer network." But that's not the real problem.)
Imagine this: You're at home. Your window's closed. Your neighbor's window is open. She plays a catchy tune on her stereo. You open your window to hear the song more clearly.
Now cops arrest you for opening your window.
What Smith did was akin to what you've just done -- it wasn't akin to breaking and entering. Your neighbor already paid for her stereo and the electricity to power it; whether or not you listen, she can still enjoy the music. If she's insane or just mean-spirited she might slam her window shut or wear headphones. But if her head contains an ounce of intelligence she won't accuse you of breaking and entering.
If your neighbor has a wi-fi router, she can choose to share it with neighbors, or she can easily lock it up if she doesn't like to share. If she doesn't lock it and others use it to browse the Web or check their e-mail, they haven't "hacked" into her system, any more than gazing at the Christmas lights across the street constitutes robbery.
The reporter and the police in this story seem to assume that using wi-fi equals breaking into someone's personal files, that Smith had access to someone else's personal computer. But using someone's wi-fi access point is something very different from accessing his personal computer and files.
The reporter conflates the usual assortment of shocking crimes (kiddie porn, credit card theft, death threats) with the common use of open wi-fi networks. He apparently hasn't sought evidence to back up his claims, and he fails to point out the harmless and productive uses thousands of people put open wi-fi networks to every day.
This article was off the scale. But too much other recent wi-fi coverage has been misinformed and dangerously sensationalized. If this sort of lazy, irresponsible reporting continues, it will encourage ham-handed legislation that will criminalize uses of new technology before we even understand what new social benefits we're prohibiting.
Reporters, I'm not quick to gripe about the press. You work hard and you're underpaid and underappreciated. I know this because I was a daily newspaper reporter for two years. But if you're not careful here you can do real damage. Please realize that wi-fi issues are much more subtle, complex, and politicized than they appear at first glance. Please run your assumptions and others' claims by people who understand the social, legal and technical intricacies of wi-fi. And please get both sides of the story. For almost every party that makes a strong claim about wi-fi, there's another group arguing the opposite point.
In the mainstream coverage of wi-fi issues that I've seen, the interests of the big telecom companies and of overeager and underinformed law enforcement personnel have been strongly overrepresented. Please balance out your coverage; please seek out the other side of the story. A useful starting point: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org).
Damon, Jon and I will present Project PlaceSite and discuss wi-fi cafe fun in San Francisco next week at Where 2.0, O'Reilly's new conference about location-aware tech.
If you're there, come say hi.
A bizarre media storm has gathered around wireless Internet cafes. Project PlaceSite and I have benefited. But this all deserves a closer look.
Tomorrow's New York Times quotes me in an article by Glenn Fleishman. My words appeared in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece last week. On May 30 a Financial Times article about wi-fi in cafes mentioned "zombie effect" [definition here], a term we invented to explain some of the reasoning behind PlaceSite. All this mainstream coverage followed Web buzz about an entry by Glenn on his Wi-Fi Networking News weblog. The entry announced that a Seattle cafe had tried turning off wi-fi on the weekends.
I'm thankful for the PlaceSite publicity but for the record: each of my partners, Damon McCormick and Jon Snydal, contributed to this project at least as much as I did. Professor Marti Hearst served a critical role as our project advisor.
A problem with the coverage: The Financial Times article strongly implies a trend in cafes across the country that involves reduction or removal of wi-fi access. But the opposite is true, at least in Seattle and San Francisco: wi-fi is becoming more ubiquitous in cafes. The article cites just three cafes -- one in Seattle and two in San Francisco -- that have limited their wi-fi access. But hundreds of cafes in these cities offer wi-fi service, and more cafes add wi-fi every month.
I see no evidence of a new trend: both of the San Francisco cafes in question have been experimenting with limited access for more than a year.
The other articles, particularly the New York Times piece, were more balanced and better informed about this. But I sense a media snowball effect that might trigger an avalanche of inaccurate coverage.
A warning to reporters: consider the numbers here, so you don't mistake aberrant behavior for what's clearly the norm.
[ UPDATE: Our launch period at A'Cuppa Tea is over. Keep an eye on placesite.com for news of upcoming launches. ]
We'll launch Project PlaceSite this Tuesday
at A'Cuppa Tea cafe and teahouse in Berkeley.
Full details: PlaceSite.com.
Come out and join in!
Help supercharge wi-fi public places in the San Francisco Bay Area!
For my final Masters project at U.C. Berkeley I'm exploring new ways in which online social interaction can move into the offline ("real") world -- and learning what online services can add to face-to-face conversation.
An important part of our research is to learn how people here interact and use wi-fi (wireless Internet) in public and semi-public places.
If you're 18 or older, live or work in the Bay Area and use wi-fi, you can help us immensely by taking a few minutes to answer the following brief survey. Your responses will be kept completely anonymous.
Here's the survey: http://www.seansavage.com/survey
We need all the responses we can get, so it would be great if you could spread the word by pointing your Bay Area friends to the survey.
This summer we'll post a report about what we learn; I'll link to the report from here when it's available.
Thanks!
Imagine opening your laptop computer in a neighborhood wireless Internet café and firing up a Web browser. Instead of your usual startup page, imagine this on your screen:
That's the core of Project PlaceSite. It introduces a new way of using wireless networks -- to create a local information service by, for and about people who are in the same café together.
We're rolling it out in Berkeley in a few weeks. Details: www.placesite.com.
Please let us know what you think. And come out and take part!
Lars Holmquist spoke of "PacMan Must Die” at Intel's Berkeley research lablet Friday.
This is an innovative game developed by Holmquist's students at the Viktoria Institute's Future Applications Lab in Göteborg, Sweden. It's a tweaked-out multi-player version of the classic game Pac Man, with two major twists.
The first twist: characters’ roles are switched. Players control ghosts invading Pac Man's home turf, trying to recover the dots stolen by Pac Man in the original game.
The second twist: the playing field is distributed across two or more devices held by multiple players.
To finish a level, a player must eat dots not just on her own screen, but on the other players' screens as well. If you send your ghost through a doorway on the bottom of your screen, the ghost disappears from your device. It enters another player's screen through a corresponding doorway. The game allows up to five players to join in on the distributed fun.
Players have to look over at one another's screens to see where to guide their characters. Physical strategy and cooperation become central to this virtual game. Opportunities for new sorts of pranks arise -- for instance, you can physically run off with your friend’s ghost.
I love this; it's another way of combining video game fun with the fun of play in real-world places.
This is the sort of rich, simple innovation that I hoped would emerge with the wi-fi enabled Nintendo DS portable video game system. But Nintendo seems to have locked down DS development, limiting it to internal and professional developers. Such professionals have years of experience and training in building traditional games. This background cripples their ability to innovate, to see beyond the constraints of traditional game platforms.
Nintendo, learn from eBay and Google and Amazon: let customers and outsiders build value for you. Open your platform and let it thrive.
Why not use wi-fi (wireless Internet) access points to track down stolen cars, bikes, purses and other valuables?
Many of Earth's major cities are becoming saturated with wi-fi access points. It's hard to find a public place in San Francisco, for instance, where a wi-fi device can't detect a nearby access point.
Imagine placing a narrow wi-fi beacon device inside the frame of your bicycle. You tell the beacon that, every day at 4 a.m., the bike is locked up at your house. Next time the clock strikes 4 a.m., the beacon turns itself on and it makes note of which wi-fi access points it can "see" from your home. It remembers that these access points represent home. Then it turns itself off again. (Wi-fi detection drains a lot of battery power -- the device stays off most of the time to save juice).
Two days later, at precisely 4 a.m., the beacon powers on and notes what access points it can "see." If it detects one or more of the "home" access points, it turns itself off again. Two days later it does the same thing, and so on. We'll call this state of affairs the beacon's default mode.
During one of these early-morning access-point checks, if the device doesn't detect a home access point, it switches into "stolen mode." It powers on every 15 minutes and checks for any open access points. (Open access points are not encrypted, so anyone -- and in our case, any beacon -- can use them to connect to the Internet.)
When the device finds an open access point within range, it sends a message to a server. The message specifies which beacon sent it, as well as a unique identification number that specifies which wi-fi access point is being used. The message also includes a list of other access points that the device "saw" during its recent travels.
Software on the server connects to a database that stores the geographic locations of known access points. It uses this information to convert the list of access points recently "seen" by the beacon to a path on a map illustrating your stolen bike's recent movement. It converts the beacon's current access point to the beacon's current location, which it marks on the map and converts to a street address. The server sends this information to your e-mail account -- and to the police, if that's what you want.
(Each time the beacon connects to the server, it also checks for commands that it's supposed to follow. Via a password-protected Web interface, you can tell the beacon to switch from "stolen" mode back to default mode. You can set a new home location, and you can set a new time for it to check each day for its "home" access point fingerprint.)
This would provide essentially the same service offered by LoJack, an extremely expensive anti-theft system for cars. LoJack depends upon a beacon that's hidden in a car. If your LoJack-equipped car is stolen, when you file a police report a radio signal is sent to the beacon that puts it into "stolen" mode, which causes it to repeatedly emit a signal over a special radio frequency. Police cars and aircraft equipped with special LoJack sensing computers can track this signal and follow it to the car. LoJack is quite expensive (Carsdirect.com sells the device for $695, for instance), and the real expense comes from the service: LoJack employees and police have to be trained to use the tracking equipment, and so on. (Other services based on Global Positioning Satellite and cellular phone systems are also quite expensive.)
Now that wi-fi is almost ubiquitous in many areas, we can create a system that allows people who live in those areas to track their stolen goods without LoJack and all of its overhead -- at a tiny fraction of the cost.
But remember that new stolen-item-tracking technologies can be put to darker uses too. Such developments mean that almost anyone might have the power to plant tracking devices on unsuspecting people and vehicles.
Look for unplanned potential within the Nintendo DS, an upcoming handheld videogame system. It uses wi-fi, as well as a proprietary Nintendo wireless format, to let a player compete and communicate with another in the same room, or with a potentially infinite number of other players via connections to the Internet through wi-fi hotspots. The New York Times says the unit will go on sale in the U.S. November 21 for $149.
Nintendo's marketing, the press, and the weblogs all seem fixated on the fact that this unit has two screens, and the fact that it will let people play the same old types of multiplayer games in mobile settings.
But I think a special combination of attributes make this a potential source of compelling new smartmobbish applications and behavior:
(1) Not only does it provide wireless networking capabilities, it's built around using wi-fi in an ad-hoc person-to-person manner -- regardless of whether wi-fi hotspots are nearby.
(2) When an open wi-fi hotspot is nearby, it can be used to connect from the field with servers on the Internet.
(3) Kids will use it, and kids aren't locked into narrow wireless communication paradigms.
(4) It's not too expensive, which might encourage a critical mass of these things in urban areas. (Compare it with Sony's upcoming $300+ wi-fi-enabled PSP game device.)
Imagine the sociolocative fun that this might enable -- if Nintendo doesn't block out nonlicensed developers.
(Thanks to Matthew Rothenberg for the tip!)
Czechy doubt: Encounter Bubbles.
Imagine sharing the collection of MP3 music files that you listen to on your PDA wirelessly with anyone nearby. Imagine converting that PDA into your own mobile, wireless Web server, through which anyone nearby who has a wi-fi enabled laptop or device can browse and download whatever Web pages, photos or other content that you choose to offer up.
A new application called Pocket Rendezvous allows you to do that. This is exciting because it takes the mobile personal Web server paradigm (as seen in Intel’s Personal Servers and in Julian Bleecker’s Wi-fi Bedouin project), and rolls it out in a form that will run on mobile devices that thousands of people already use.
But get this: while Pocket Rendezvous uses the device discovery and networking protocol most famous for its use in Apple’s Rendezvous system, Pocket Rendezvous runs only on (Microsoft) PocketPC devices! How darkly ironic… Nonetheless, bravo to Simeda, the small German software firm behind Pocket Rendezvous. I hope they port this to PalmOS soon so I can use it on my wi-fi enabled Palm.
(Thanks to Joe, Howard and The Register for the tip.)
Julian Bleecker's wifi.Bedouin project has my mind churning. Bleecker frames this as a product and a service: essentially it's a laptop in a backpack with wi-fi antennas, a PDA remote control, and software that creates your own little "island Internet."
Forget about the packaging. The big innovation here lies in the paradigm, in viewing your wi-fi-enabled laptop as a server and a filter rather than a client.
What can you do with this? Here's an example: have fun in Starbucks. Walk into a Starbucks cafe, sit back and watch customers come in, fire up their laptops and connect to your wi-fi node. They think they've jacked in to the Internet, but really they're connected to your mobile server. You can serve their Web browsers whatever content you want -- an art piece, brand-damaging fake Starbucks ads, fake coupons, photos of your cat, whatever. Mix your content with real Internet connectivity and content served up via the cafe's wi-fi service. (Combine this with a Guerilla Cafe DJ setup and you've got a toolkit that would make Starbucks interventionist Reverend Billy proud.)
It's important that we engage in this sort of play and think through these things, because not all the possibilities brought to light here are funny. McDonald's or Starbuck's or anyone else can intercept passwords and can easily monitor, record, forge and censor unprotected wi-fi communications. We can prevent such misdeeds through technical means, but before the solutions can be perfected and adopted we need to raise public awareness that the problems exist. Pranksters can spread this sort of consciousness.
This is just one example of what we can do with systems like Bedouin. Check out Bleecker's scenarios page (and click through the three scenarios) for more.
3/24/04 UPDATE: Arthur Law brings up two other fun possibilities. (1) For business people and software developers: why not put the project work on a bedouin server and huddle the workgroup around a campfire? (2) For video game afficionados: won't weddings and funerals be more fun when you and your laptop-toting friends engage in action-packed shoot-em-up tournaments during the ceremonies? Why wait for high-speed Internet coverage to reach your destination when you can bring the connectivity with you?
5/04/04 UPDATE: I recently came across another intriguing application that converts local machines (in this case, handheld computers) into miniature wi-fi Web servers. It's called Hocman and it's designed to allow motorcyclists to exchange social information via HTTP when they encounter one another on the road. Details here.)
5/16/04 UPDATE: It turns out that Intel Research has been doing its own work using the mobile server paradigm, using tiny Personal Servers.
Last February I requested a small, cheap mobile device that:
Back then, the hardware necessary to make this a practical reality wasn't cheap and it wasn't widely in use. Now it is. Many of the most popular PDAs (personal digital assistants), like my new Palm Tungsten C, provide Web browsers and high-bandwidth wi-fi Internet connectivity.
We have the hardware. We have the infrastructure -- the cities are becoming saturated with wi-fi hotspots, many of them free for public use, and robust Internet telephony networks have been in use for years.
And we have the client software -- but it hasn't been designed for the right devices. A handful of firms like Dialpad and Net2Phone already provide cheap PC-to-phone voice service. But none of them seem to have ported their client applications for use on PDAs.
What are these firms waiting for? For a very modest investment in resources, Dialpad and its competitors can make a very compelling offer: global telephone service on the go for prices less than one-tenth what you pay for mobile or even land-line phone service.
Dialpad: I have my portable wi-fi telephone and I'm ready to pay you to use it. What are you waiting for?
Below I've posted a map and a list of cafes near the University of California, Berkeley campus that offer free wireless Internet access. If you have a laptop or other device with a Wi-Fi (802.11b) card, turn it on in one of these places to enjoy a free high-speed connection.
I'm surprised that so few free wi-fi cafes exist in Berkeley, considering that more than 70 such cafes thrive in San Francisco. Do you know of any free wi-fi cafes near the UC Berkeley campus that I'm missing? If so, please let me know: sean[at]cheesebikini.com.
Help expand this list: next time you pass one of those big cafes near campus that charge exorbitant usage fees, go in and tell the manager that she's losing business to the dozens of Bay Area cafes that provide free wi-fi access.
UPDATE 6/26/05: If you use Windows and you're interested in seeing who's in cafes and at other hotspots nearby, check out Meetro. It's not available for Macs so I haven't been able to try it out but it looks like fun. -Sean
1 Berkeley Espresso: 1900 Shattuck Avenue, at Hearst Avenue. The staff here can be a tad gruff, but this is a decent place to get work done. There are plenty of tables and the management provides more than the usual number of power outlets; the coffee's not bad and they stay open til 11 pm weeknights. Added 9/7/03. map2 Fertile Grounds: 1796 Shattuck Avenue, at Delaware Street. The staff here is much more friendly than the overworked folks at Berkeley Espresso, and I think the coffee's better. But they close much earlier than Berkeley Espresso. (I'll find out the precise closing time and post it here soon.) Added 9/7/03. map
3 Free Speech Movement Cafe: Moffitt Library, First Floor, University Drive at Sather Road on the UC Berkeley Campus. The cafe provides wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but to use it you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. It's a great, lively space decked out with memorabilia celebrating the 1964 Berkeley student protests. But there's a chilling item in the corner: a large television set displays CNN all day long; a sign warns patrons that the TV's for viewing CNN, and that "the channel and volume controls are fixed and cannot be manually adjusted." So in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Cafe, CNN has a lot more freedom of speech than anyone else. The cafe is open til 2 am Sunday through Thursday; they close at 10 pm Fridays and Saturdays. This cafe is very popular with Berkeley undergrads; don't count on getting a table during peak times. Tip: sometimes the classroom next to the cafe is left unlocked when it's empty; it's within range of the cafe wi-fi router, and if you can sneak in it's a great quiet place to get some work done. Added 9/7/03. map | site
4 The Bear's Lair: First floor of the student union, 2475 Bancroft Way, between Telegraph Avenue and Dana Street on the UC Berkeley Campus. You'll find a big cafe and food court here, as well as an adjoining bar with fairly cheap beer. The entire complex has wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. Added 9/7/03. map | site
5 International House: 2299 Piedmont Avenue, at Bancroft. The cafe provides wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but to use it you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. Thanks to Andria for the tip. Added 10/25/04. map | site6 Addison Annex Cafe: 2107 Addison Street, at Shattuck Avenue. Added 11/7/03. map
7 Le Bateau Ivre: 2629 Telegraph Avenue, at Carleton Street. Added 11/7/03. map
8 Brewed Awakening: 1807 Euclid Avenue, at Ridge Road. WARNING: Don't be tricked into paying for access that has already been paid for! This cafe does offer free wi-fi, but the access is through Sip and Surf, a service provider that forces you to submit a credit card number before you can register for free access. Your credit card won't be charged, IF you choose the free-access option when submitting your credit card. Jeff Wolf warns that the design of the sign-up process is very unclear and he inadvertently and unnecessarily signed up for a paid account. So be sure to pay attention during the sign-up process so you're not misled into paying. Thanks to Jeff Wolf for the tip. Added 6/13/04. map | site
9 Yali's Cafe: 1920 Oxford Street, at Berkeley Way. Thanks to John Landahl for the tip. Added 10/25/04. map
If I missed a cafe, or if one of these cafes closes or begins charging for Wi-Fi use, drop me a line and I'll update the list: sean[at]cheesebikini.com. (Remember this is a list of free Wi-Fi cafes, so please don't contact me about cafes that charge a fee for Wi-Fi usage.)
The folks at Beast Blog are putting together a list of free wi-fi locations throughout the East Bay.
Here's a list of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the world: wififreespot.com.
And here's a list of open wireless nodes that Bay Area people have set up, mostly in their homes.
Join the free networks movement! Details: freenetworks.org, and the Bay Area Wireless Users' Group.
This week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California was great fun. I enjoyed the presentations and the ideas, but it was the behavior of the attendees that really fascinated me.
The conference wasn't all "there."
Much of it took place elsewhere, and everywhere -- in cyberspace. My attention was always torn between the physical conference and the virtual conference.
I've never seen so many networked gadgets in use simultaneously in one place. During any given session, much of the audience had their laptops open and online thanks to power outlets and wireless Internet service throughout the conference rooms, lounges and hallways. I was immersed in bandwidth; I was surrounded by a chorus of whirring laptops and clicking keys.
For me, this was a totally new sort of event -- but soon, experiences like this will become commonplace.
The typical scene: up front the speaker presents her talk, projecting a slide show or a demo onto the wall-sized screens. A glance around the darkened room reveals dozens of ghostly blue-white faces gazing into laptop screens.
Many of them are engaged in online chat rooms. ConFab, a Web-based chat tool, was built just for the conference. It allows a person to mouse-over a map of the conference rooms, to specify which physical-world room he's sitting in, to engage in text chats with other attendees, and to see how many people are logged into each conference room. He can even pay a virtual visit to another conference room to find out what people are chatting about over there.
(Network problems made staying connected to ConFab very difficult. But people conferred in more traditional Internet Relay Chat rooms too.)
In the chat rooms people crack jokes and trade opinions about what the speaker is saying, and they write brief summaries of what's going on for people who are tuned in to the conference from other parts of the planet.
People read other folks' comments. They examine the speaker's Web site. They tune in to chats going on simultaneously in the other conference sessions, judging whether to step out and join the session going on next door.
And they blog. I watched at least three people pull out digital cameras during presentations, take snapshots and upload the images to their blogs right there.
People collaborate to take notes on the presentations and discussions using wikis. Groups of people use Hydra, a collaborative editing tool that allows multiple users to elegantly write, edit and add to a single document simultaneously.
That pattern was repeated endlessly throughout the conference. Everyone's energies were divided between cyberspace and the physical world. This is a fascinating phenomenon, but when the novelty wears off will such connectedness make for better or worse conferences?
Did the average attendee go home with more or less knowledge, with more or fewer useful acquaintances, with more or less encouragement than they would have acquired without the digital networking? What do you think?
The conference left me more confused about these questions than ever. For one thing, I wasted a lot of my attention and energy dealing with a couple of basic technical problems that the organizers can easily iron out in time for next year's conference. But next year, won't my attention be devoted to a new set of problems to wrestle or configurations to fine-tune as more real-world subtleties slip by unnoticed?
I want to experiment more with this, and I know I won't have to wait long.
(A freakish footnote: I'm writing this entry on my laptop in a Berkeley WiFi cafe, days after the conference ended. Three other geeks bend over three other laptops by the window. They're talking about their experiences at the same conference, as they post entries to their own blogs about it. Should I laugh or cry?)
(Photos in this entry by Derrick Story of the O'Reilly Network.)
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[Also see the cheesebikini map of free Berkeley wi-fi cafes] Here are a map and a list of San Francisco cafes that offer free wireless Internet access. If you have a laptop or other device with Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) capability, turn it on in one of these places to enjoy a free high-speed connection. 
UPDATE 3/2/05: A four-block zone of Chestnut Street in San Francisco's über-gentrified Marina District is now immersed in free wi-fi, courtesy of AnchorFree. The wi-fi zone covers Chestnut between Fillmore and Scott Streets, according to MacWorld. Thanks to Denis Hiller for the tip -- and the wi-fi! Why certain cafes disappeared from the list and map: In late 2003, ZRNet, a company that outfitted many cafes with wi-fi hot-spots, withdrew free wi-fi service from all of these cafes, so I removed ZRNet cafes from the list. These cafes include: Atlas Cafe (ouch!), Cole Valley Cafe, Cafe XO, Tart to Tart, Cafe International, Brainwash Cafe and Laundromat, the Muddy Waters cafes, most of the Royal Grounds cafes, Cafe La Taza, Java on Ocean, Java Beach and Simple Pleasures. - Sean, 11/7/03 2 H Cafe: 380 17th Street, at Sanchez. Jason Harlan reports that now an employee here "forces you to share tables with other laptop users... and he's rude." map | site
Czech this out: Lloyd Nebres spent a day bouncing from one wi-fi cafe to another across San Francisco, posting photos and dispatches along the way to create a little travelogue. The folks at Beast Blog are putting together a list of free wi-fi locations in the East Bay. Here's another list of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the Bay Area and the world: wififreespot.com. And here's a list of open wireless nodes that Bay Area people have set up, mostly in their homes. Join the free networks movement! Details: freenetworks.org, and the Bay Area Wireless Users' Group. February 23, 2003
Wi-Fi Internet Telephone
I want a small, cheap mobile device that: (Services like PhoneFree and Net2Phone already let you make very cheap calls to worldwide telephone numbers, over the Internet using a personal computer. Now that Wi-Fi signals are becoming so widespread, a small, cheap device dedicated to this application would be extremely handy.) |