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Warchalking Visual Cues To Urban WLANs
elucidus writes "Matt Jones has put out a PDF and EPS outlining symbols to use in Warchalking the WLAN nodes of your community. Here's a pic. Ben Hammersly dubs them Hobo Runes." Brings to mind pictures of scruffy individuals around a fire with picturebooks, taking a pull from some ripple while reading slashdot.
As Matt's server screams in the dark London night, you could spell my name right...HammerslEy
Anyhow, the pic on Matt's site shows the rune to my wireless node. It's in Kensington, just round the corner from Imperial College. A T1. Help yourself.
Lack of durability is a feature: The more washed out a mark is, the older and therefore less reliable is the conveyed information.
'Were' being the word, here. I.e. they were open, they were visited, some exciting thing happened and their obit was printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Probably not so dramatic, but imagine someone doing a drive-by of Arthur Andersen or Enron and pilfering a few online documents...
You're concept also gives me pause to think about all the nuts who hang around old ruins in the world, e.g. Stonehenge, and feel there's some great power eminating from them... most likely they're markers of where (political) power was concentrated and is all used up by now. Ah, well, if they weren't oohing and ahhing and buying into some cult they'd probably be sending spam, too.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
(WiFi Logo Here)
www.domain.com/wifi
If you saw this on the side of a building, you should have enough to go on. If that site wants you to use their system, then the URL would point to a page telling you everything you need to know to share their system.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Amazing. 48 comments as of this post and no one has yet commented on the obvious: that these signs are nothing more than telling people where they can steal free bandwidth.
Isn't anybody worried about a "tragedy of the commons" effect here? One or two people chancing upon an open WiFi link is one thing, but a systematic method of exploiting bandwith amounts to a denial of service attack upon the poor network that's targeted.
This is F***ing ridiculous. Go buy your OWN damn access and stop taking others' just because you can.
If it washes off when it rains, is it still vandalism?
Last I checked, vandalism was damaging or destroying property. Spraypaint or marker might be considered vandalism because it's permanant, but chalk?
It seems that this is an interesting idea, but lacking in usability. There are two major problems as I see it.
1.) The chalk will be easily washed away, and the location lost. (not to mention they warn the local network administrators)
2.) You have to just walk around and randomly find one of these markings.
A better solution would be somewhere online that warchalkers could upload locations (GPS maybe) and then you could easily find the access point nearest you.
- RG
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Don't pet the burning dog
Don't pet the burning dog
Remember when IBM was hauled into court for marking up city sidewalks with the love/peace/linux thing?
Now we'll see love/peace/linux/<802.11b info>.
Free lov^M^M^MBandwidth for all!
-Pete
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