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/

I don't know aobut this.

[citroidSD]

From the article I get the impression it seems like one could mistake this for one of those affiliate "scams." Let me get this straight, I set up a wireless node, and then I get paid for my bandwidth, or I can connect to other wireless sputnik nodes? Only problem with that is that my (and your) broadband providers aren't going to be to keen on the idea of me being a reseller of bandwidth, when I originally signed up as an end home consumer for DSL. I'm not harping on the hardware and code, that seems all nice and nifty, but the idea of reselling your bandwidth probably will not go over too well.