Linuxcare Founders Go Wireless

LinuxCare founders Dave Sifry, Art Tyde and Dave LaDuke have started their second company: Sputnik. Basically, they have an ISO you can download that will turn a laptop with an 802.11b card into a wireless gateway. They also wrote a user-authentication scheme that reroutes all traffic to the gateway until the user logs in via a web form. This should sound familiar to people who stay in broadband capable hotels a lot. Using this authentication technique, the software allows you to choose who can and cannot use your gateway, and in you'll be able to charge strangers for access (with Sputnik handling the billing). This will likely get some isps a wee bit upset. NewsForge has an article detailing what they are doing. Update: Turns out the authentication wasn't written by Sputnik, my bad. They use NoCatAuth Disclaimer: I've known these guys for a long time and am pals with them, so I waited until someone else (in this case Grant at NewsForge and the NYT) put something up independently about them before linking to them.

Comments

Sputnik uses NoCat captive portal

[Anonymous Coward]

Sputnik didn't write the 'captive portal' authentication system. It's a GPL'd program called
NoCat. http://www.nocat.net/

This is actually pretty cool

[Ryan Amos]

Even with Ricochet coming back, this seems like a much better idea if it catches on. Granted, if there are no gateways, nobody can use it, but it'd be a lot faster than Ricochet and (it seems) based off actual usage, not monthly fees. It seems there's a lot of potential for abuse here, but I'd definately like to check this out, it seems like a good way to make a little extra cash (though I'm curious if there's a way to block out abusive users, I don't need any m4d h4x0rz cracking machines through my IP.) This will also probably violate a lot of ISPs ToSes, but who cares, most of us are violating them anyway. :)