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Warchalking Visual Cues To Urban WLANs

Posted by chrisd on from the making-internet-cafes-obsolete dept.

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.

3 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. How Times Change by johnalex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    During the Depression, hoboes used signs to signal where they could get a meal. Nowadays, geeks use signs to signal where we can get a decent 'Net connection. We're hungry, but we're informed.

    Who cares about eating as long as I get my /. fix.

    --
    JA
    http://www.johnalex.org/
  2. Heh, laugh by DG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My job - before I retired - in the Canadian Army was armoured recce. We were the guys who went out in advance of the main troop body, looking for the bad guys so that the good guys with big guns could come kill them.

    One of our other jobs was to survey routes and determine their suitability for passing military traffic. We would prepare "route reports" that would indicate widths, overhead clearences, the strength of the road surface (tanks chew up roads pretty quickly) and how much weight bridges could carry (we were taught techniques for inspecting bridges and making guesses as to how much weight they would hold.)

    Certain types of "resources" would be noted on the reports, but they tended to be things like "gravel pit here" (for repairing roads torn up by tanks) or "harbour site here" (a good place to park vehicles off the route)

    If anybody were to know about "secret peacekeeper sign codes" it would be us - and I can state categorically that there is no such thing.

    There ARE some military signs around, but in North America they are temporary, not permenent. If you see a sign with a card suit on it, and an arrow (or sometimes a unit patch) that is a convoy route mark sign. It helps keep the poor non-recce types from getting lost while moving from one place to another, and they are removed once the convoy is complete.

    In Europe, you'll see a lot of "bridge classification" signs that will have a tank, and a number, and possibly a truck, and a number. The number is the number of tons the bridge will support, the tank represents "tracked vehicles" and the truck represents "wheeled vehicles"

    But these guys are absolute loons.

    Feel free to laugh.

    DG

    --
    Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
  3. I am a bit annoied by this... by 00_NOP · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...because I am one of those people trying to seriously encourage community wireless and if that activity is seen to be some sort of cracker plot it will be damaged.

    I want the local computer users near me to buy wireless cards and log into my node, they aren't going to buy the cards if they think somebody is going to use them to steal their data.