Whisher: exchange passwords to share Wifi • 01 Jul 2007
There are different scenarios that enable people to share their Wifi. FON uses customer Wifi routers, Wifidog/OpenWRT uses custom server machines (PCs), and Whisher has a an interesting alternative: they aggregate Wifi passwords. You install an local application that you communicate the WEP/WPA key of your Wifi router to. This application will communicate this to the central Whisher service and give it to other clients when required. The other users do not see the actual key, it’s their application that does the login. Their mapping page seems to be broken, so it’s hard to tell how many Whisher-compatible access points...
Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection • 13 Apr 2006
I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little...
REQ: more “BEING SPACES” in Brussels • 15 Mar 2006
Anyone who often works at home is probably familiar with this: sometimes you would like to work somewhere else to finish something undisturbed, to see some people while you work instead of just the PC and the refrigerator, to have a meeting in a pleasant location, to be in another environment. I often do some work at the Recyclart or the AB Café, and almost always I’m the only nomadic worker there. Both places are cosy and have free Wifi, but they’re not real offices: there is no printer, no meeting room, no water cooler. And since I don’t pay...
Ancienne Belgique rocks • 28 Feb 2006
I’m in the restaurant of the Ancienne Belgique and it’s only a few steps away from heaven:
Municipal WiFi: requirements for success • 01 Dec 2005
Municipal Wifi is gaining speed. Some of the efforts are institutional (Joy Ito joins the FON advisory board, networks are being installed in San Francisco and New Orleans) and some are grassroots (John is setting up a Wifi cloud in Rio …)
Oakland installs free municipal Wifi • 03 Nov 2005
The goal of Wireless Oakland is to prepare Oakland County and its workforce for the jobs and technology of tomorrow. In conjunction with the Emerging Sectors Initiative, it will enhance Oakland County’s ability to attract and retain high-tech and nanotechnology corporations.
(…)
The seven Pilot Projects (Royal Oak, Pontiac, Troy, Birmingham, Madison Heights, Oak Park, and Wixom) will be started by the end of 2005 and should be completed during the first quarter of 2006. County-wide wireless internet coverage is expected in mid to late 2007.
from co.oakland.mi.us
Open Wifi Hotspots in Brussels • 27 Oct 2005
This blog post is from 2005 – it's here for historic reasons, but none of the original links still work.
Public WiFi: the on-line consumer • 18 Oct 2005
People who know me, have heard me nag about open hotspot cafés in Brussels. My vision is that within 6 months, there should be a couple of dozen open Wi-Fi hotspots in Brussels so a guy with a laptop (like me) can find one within 1 km of wherever I happen to be in Brussels. I’m developing an idea for creating a set-up that is interesting for the Wi-Fi end-users, the infrastructure owners (e.g. a bar owner) and the ISP (that’s the hard part). More about that later.
Anyone who often works at home is probably familiar with this: sometimes you would like to work somewhere else to finish something undisturbed, to see some people while you work instead of just the PC and the refrigerator, to have a meeting in a pleasant location, to be in another environment. I often do some work at the Recyclart or the AB Café, and almost always I’m the only nomadic worker there. Both places are cosy and have free Wifi, but they’re not real offices: there is no printer, no meeting room, no water cooler. And since I don’t pay...
