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hmmm I guess this scythe won't work... :D http://www.toaster.net/~slazar/freebsd.gif

San fransisco, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Adelaide, Sydney, London, Rotterdam, And more

But, assuming you mean by an "Orinoco card", a wireless Orinoco card, you could always check for open community LANs in the areas you are travelling. At http://www.toaster.net/wireless/community.html there's a list of open wirless LANs, including four such LANs in the UK, one specifically in London.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

For instance, here's a list of intentionally open wireless access points around SF

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

The thing that I have to wonder about in all of this is potentially nasty liability that having an open access point may open you up to.

We have all read the stories of the FBI busting people's doors down and confiscating equipment because they were suspected of a heinous act, be it hacking, kiddie-porn, etc.

Hell, just inviting a few thousand of your closest friends to join your pyramid scheme is usually enough to get your ISP to cut your connection with no warning. Do you really want to risk becoming spam central?

The last thing I want is my door being busted down because of what an anonymous freak with an 802.11 card did from behind MY IP address!

Although I applaud the generosity of the people who provide the so-called "community networks", I would have to think they are just opening themselves up to a world of hurt.

We're using an access point located outside our firewall behind another firewall. [...] Anyone breaking the security of our access point gets plain old Internet access and doesn't get into the corporate net.

It is one thing to openly allow access, with users presumably understanding that they should not abuse a common resource. It is another to leave your (I'm assuming) fat pipe open to NetStumblers, who may be more inclined to over-exploit it while they still can.

Also, does unencrypted SMTP or other traffic go in/out via this link? You have a sniffer's paradise if it does.

With the population density of London, I would think that one or two loosely affiliated 802.11b networks would give coverage would rival any commercial offering.

This is on the heels of wired article that sugested www.toaster.net for 802.11 in the SF bay area....

The owner of toaster.net has assembled a more comprehensive list. He himself created a community net by the simple expedient of opening up a wireless net he had installed for his own use. His only restrictions are the obvious ones: no permanent connections, no spam, no bandwidth hogging (unless you ask first).

It's nice. But I have to wonder. In an internet totally infested with spammers, script kiddies, goat-sexers, and other abusers of electronic openness, how long can this kind of free service last?

__

Read about it in Wired.

802.11b freenets are great and I by all means encourage more people to open them up and run them (I have a little one running), but they are hardly a realistic threat to ISPs. The simple fact is that WiFi just doesn't have enough range and penetration to make significant coverage economically feasible ad-hoc. It takes a lot of placements to get decent coverage, particularly when leaves, many walls, and most other obstructions attenuate the signal a great deal. Hell, look at all the money Metricom had to pump into getting decent coverage (different tech, but similar range issues).

If you look at the major freenet networks (such as SFLan and BAWUG here in San Francisco or others), their actual coverage is really quite tiny. Sure, you can find a good number more by war driving around the city, but that hardly gets to the point that were making a dent in the ISP revenue stream. While I'm optimistic on their expanding and the radios improving, what percentage of SF residents realistically would have usuable signal strength in their homes in 1, 2, even 3 years out?

If you do decide to run a freenet, get an external antenna with some decent gain, though WAP antenna connectors have to be proprietary, most are just reversed DNC or the like. You get a pretty shocking increase in range and penetration even with a 3db omni and a lot less sensitivity to the wireless card's orientation (which is all to often flat and sub-optimal for pickup). A lot of the freenet spec out relatively expensive hardware (< $1K for SFLan), but a little antenna hacking can get most any WAP to reach out for semi-decent range.

Regards, RJS

Just found a rather extensive list of public fixed wireless links at: http://www.toaster.net/wireless/community.html Later! :-)

Yes, Cliff Skolnick of "BAWUG" - the San Francisco Bay Area wireless interest group mentioned in the article - has such a database (for the Bay Area) online here. (See the "map" links for latitude/longitude coordinates that you can enter into a GPS receiver.)