Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Wireless City

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hey-buddy-wanna-buy-a-laptop dept.

bigfatlamer writes "This week's NY Times City Section has an article (FRRYYY) on wireless access in New York City's busiest park, Bryant Park. The director of the park has installed a free 802.11b network with complete coverage of the park with help from NYC Wireless. From the article: 'With some clever engineering and hardware from Cisco Systems and Intel, the wireless park was born. Just as park users could sit wherever they liked, so too could they gain access where they liked. The eight-megabytes-per-second connection was as free as the sunshine and the green grass.' NYC Wireless is currently working with the Parks Dept. to put similar networks in Madison Square and Tompkins Square Parks. If they could do Prospect Park (3 blocks from my house) life would be perfect." NYCwireless helps those who help themselves...

3 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Unacountable bits? by don_carnage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps a traffic shaper would be usefull as well to keep one node from eating up all of the bandwidth.

    The problem with a free service like this is that it will be free up until the point where someone abuses it.

    --
    Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
  2. Always this argument... by Thalia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am tired of the usual diatribe from security people that bandwidth is this great outlet for danger. Any system could be used for DOS, DDOS, Spam, spoofing, hacking onto other machines in the park, secret Chinese spy deals, and more. Get over it.

    Some would liken IP connectivity to a printing press, and argue the company providing the press must watch each item printed against copyrighted, subversive, or pornographic works. Others would argue it is like electricity, a utility that is provided fairly cheaply after the initial wiring is installed, and need not be charged for at all for small amounts. The few who see it as a wilderness, full of abuse and crime and desparados checking for weakness tend to sell computer security services.

    1. Re:Always this argument... by Incongruity · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The few who see it as a wilderness, full of abuse and crime and desparados checking for weakness tend to sell computer security services.

      You've never had your email address harvested by a spammer, have you? Through a security flaw in my University's content sharing arrangement with another university, many many email addresses were harvested and spammed bigtime. The dramatic increase in mail volume caused problems for our mail servers...nothing that the IT folks couldn't handle but it was a problem.

      That kind of thing is the simplest example of abuse of the internet.

      The notion that the internet isn't actually an insecure, unsafe network that should, by its very nature be "untrusted" unless secured is a dangerous one. Just because you haven't had a problem yet doesn't mean that you won't.

      A free wireless connection to the internet means that someone with a laptop could sit out there and gerate millions of spams and never be traced back to anything more than a (likely spoofed) MAC address. The only way to stop that from happening is through thoughtful design and good network practices. IMHO, that includes exgress filtering on the network to prevent excessive spam...

      Not an IT security sales guy, -tcp