Slashdot Mirror
UK to get Public Wireless LAN
shanksd1 writes "The IEE Review for May reports that BT is announcing the UK's first public access wireless LAN, with a little help from Motorola and Cisco. 400 wireless hotspots of range 100m should be implemented by June 2003, and 4000 by June 2005. These 500 kb/s access points will be located in hotels, railway stations, airports, bars and
coffee shops."
In Stockholm if you have a laptop with a wlan card you can sniff for open access points from wlans used by companys.
Quite a lot of them don't use encryption or locked down MAC addresses so you can leech bandwidth from about half a dussin open networks while sipping coffee at a nice cosy coffee shop.
I imagine this must be ten times worse in big cities like NY.
Every time I hear about this type of thing, the exact same question springs into my mind. How is user accountability enforced in this type of "wide open" network enviroment. Normally, people can be back-tracked to their ISP, and a name can be connected to an IP for a given time frame. What's to stop someone from using these public networks as a means to perform malicious behaviour anonymously? In a setup like I'm picturing, there wouldn't even be a need to spoof your IP address.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
In Britain, they're generally known as "Gumbies". This is because the original credit cards, produced in the 1850s, were made from an indian rubber - gum - like substance.
They were around the same size and shape as a modern card, but about four times as thick, with most of the details of the credit card issuer, and credit card number, together with a seal, being etched into the card. Retailers would coat the reverse-image etched side of the card with ink and then print the image onto the bill. It provided a relatively secure means of authentication.
Modern cards in Britain, of course, contain smart-chips, similar to full-size SIMs in GSM cellphones, which has lead to "simmies" being another name for the things, which is gaining popularity.
It's funny you should say that. In 1892, the Allied Northern Credit Corporation experimented with a cheaper card made from hemp. The hemp was split into a congealed gel substance which hardenned when dried, and raw fibres. The two were seperated and then mixed together again to create a toughened credit card. Unlike the rubber cards, the cards contained their own ink, which would seep through when light pressure was applied, drying instantly due to the vacuum effect when the pressure was released. The "ink", again, was hemp derived, a black oil mixed with a small amount of alcohol, the entire card's only non-hemp derived ingredient.
Despite being technically superior to the rubber cards, the cards didn't catch on. Uninformed retailers challenged the authenticity of the cards, and they were not popular with customers as a result. Allied Northern switched to standard rubber cards in 1902, well before the introduction of plastic cards in 1951, and before the 1933 Controlled Substances Act effectively made the cards illegal.
You can find out more about this here.