Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Wifi Backpack
ruzel writes "Julian Bleecker's web site TechKwonDo describes a project that is a wifi base station in a backpack. 'WiFi.Bedouin is a wearable, mobile 802.11b node disconnected from the global Internet. It forms a WiFi "island Internet" challenging conventional assumptions about WiFi and suggesting new architectures for digital networks that are based on physical proximity rather than solely connectivity.' The motivation is essentially subversive but what other uses are there for a device like this?"
Personally I think if you mounted these on a bunch of Vespas, you could make good use of a City grid network for a game of Pacman or some other monster around the corner game. You will only be able to interact with other people when your Wifi signals overlap.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
It's a wifi station that's not plugged into a broaddband connection.
It has no uplink.
Usually, there's an uplink, right?
Think of it like Gnutella. Anyone can become a hub, and if two people connect to it, you are part of the same network. Now imagine gnutella over something like, CB radio. It's all proximity based.
All inventions aren't about solving an existing problem. Sometimes, it's about enhancing life.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Bah. I hate exercise.
Seriously, though, I don't really see a great advantage of having a singular wifi-spot and no internet connectivity. If you had, say, a satellite uplink, you could then provide wifi to a group in an area, but it's not like I could post on slashdot if all I had was an intranet island, particularly one with minimal range.
I can see some interesting social environments that could crop up as a result of wireless in general, though I think it'd happen along the PDA or bluetooth front. Information trading, for instance - social groups could share info like MP3s without fear of reprisal from the big bad media companies. I hear text messaging is really huge in places like hong kong, where you can pick someone up in a bar using your cell phone. I imagine if you were in a wilderness or military setting, it could be pretty nice, but they already have things like GPS and secure satellite uplinks. But base station backpacking?
Here's an ideal situation. Have a LAN party in the middle of the Ozarks by linking your backpacks together in a chain. Sure, you can play Quake now until your laptop dies. This, of course, that defeats the WHOLE PURPOSE of being in the woods, which is to get away from technology.
By and large, this is what we call a "Powerbook." Okay, it does some stuff like translating URLs to arbitrary local pages, but that is of limited use. At least for OS X users.
To understand what I mean, go to a Macworld Expo Keynote with your Airport card. You'll see dozens of different Airport networks pop up. Because everyone has Rendezvous, you can use iChat to chat with any of them, and you can use Rendezvous to share your locally available web pages automatically. They'll even show up in Safari's bookmarks. The best part is, you could see what pages you're going to, rather than being redirected at random.
When I go to the AdHoc Conference this year (used to be MacHack), I'm going to have my powerbook set up with a Wiki so that, if I collaborate on my Hack again, it'll be an easy way to share the information. Also, during the Hack contest, anyone who wanted to could open a copy of SubEthaEdit and record their notes from the show. It allowed a quick collaboration between several to dozens of people on covering the show.
So, in general, it just doesn't seem to do much for you, aside from pranks. I suppose it's good for people who don't have Rendezvous enabled throughout their operating system.
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Isn't this just a bigger verion of bluetooth.
Really, it's backpack sized with more range and more bw, but in effect it is looking a lot like the dream of bluetooth to me. I could be wrong though.
I have a powerbook which can act as an AP, and of course has rendezvous which actually makes these kinds of temporary networks *USEFUL*.
:-).
I have a sharp Zaurus with hostap, which is a base station in my pocket (and yes I'm happy to see you
I never thought of this as "shattering new paradigms" or "redefining networking" or "revolutionizing the world of computing" or whatever.
This is the same mentality that says "windows" or "plug and play" or "1-click shopping" should be a brand, instead of just being the way things are.
*shrug*
I work at a fixed wireless ISP in a rural area that has been using this for a while to do hookups, we have a backpack with one of our modems, a battery, inverter, and a netgear AP, one guy wears the backpack and takes an antenna to look for signal while another guy with a wireless pda telnets into the modem to read off the signal, this can also be done with one person with the pda mounted on the antenna pole, its proved pretty usefull and makes our hookups alot easier.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Anybody recognize artspeak when they read it? Try reading the phrase "an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of [buzzwords]" or "challenging conventional assumptions about [buzzwords]" to figure out what is going on here. The actual tech content is not what the FA is about (I did R the FA, BTW). These are the phrases that you put in your artist's statement, either to please the people who funded you, or to try to please people who might fund you. So, the text that you're reading as "check out this great new technology!" is, in fact, not saying that at all.
/. editor trying to sneak some culture into yr. daily surf, or did aforementioned editor miss out on the fact that this is an ART PROJECT?
/.; if you could mass-produce the damn things, it might be different. Anyone remember how Usenet worked, back in the eighties? See, if you're a digital-art-nerd, you read about this project and immediately envision a city-wide collaborative WAN, one that's just about as anarchic as Usenet was, immediately pre-WWW.)
So, it's not supposed to solve anybody's problems, unless they're having funding problems.
The big question for me is: Is this a
(I think it's a pretty cool art project, actually, but not one that should be covered here on
Get a linux distro tuned just for this ad-hoc network... setup a nice cache server and ipv6 and let it accept everyone... all the users woul get in vacinity would supply their own address(ipv6, again) and would setup a wireless p2p ad-hoc network... the more users using a cache system the more % of the internet it holds...
If I had one of these, I'd use some sort of uplink (cell, but faster would be nice). That way you could walk around and sniff the traffic of unsuspecting victims.
You see, WinXP joins the network with the best signal. If I'm sitting next to someone, they'll bump onto my open network and may not even know it, leaving me free to sniff away.
Whaddya think? Is there potential for this sort of trick?
***
The usefuilness is close to what I see with the Free Wireless network I helped set up with a group of other people in my town.
when the power goes out, we are still running because of the distributed nature of the system and it's access points the Local Cable provider can go down taking all cable modems offline and we are still online. If we lose our Net connection also then we are still live but not net connected.. Which is not bad as the microserver (a 486 baby AT motherboard with a 256Meg CF card for the OS and webfiles) is still running and taking over to redirect all web connections to a web page stating the problem and allowing access to the mini-forums for communication.
it works great.. we had a nice test last fall when we lost power here in the midwest.. our network was up and live for 4 hours and 20 of us were chatting about what happened over the wireless net. Now expand this to the portable side and you can easily add portable extensions by using this setup for special events.
I can only imagine the same thing can be done easily with a few "backpackers" at a medium sized event.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah, it is a lot of buzzwords, agreed. But if you read deeper into the documentation on the site, the "subversive" nature of the device is to use it to intercept signals from people using wifi in a Starbucks or an airport or something. Without realizing it, instead of hooking up to Boingo, they've hooked up to you. There's some fun to be had there.
_____________________________
As a thought... ...yeah! If I may be so bold as to expound on this a little...
Imagine, if you will, a central server somewhere on the internet (maybe you run it, maybe you lease time on it, whatever.). You have the IP address (and/or domain name), as do your friends and family. You log onto this trusted server, send some validation string (password, processor ID, whatever) that identifies you as you, and the server provides you with LAN emulation services; i.e., everyone who's logged in has access to each other's computers just like they were all sitting on the same router.
With this environment in mind, you could set up 'global' messaging services, file sharing utilities, have a central virus scanner that eliminates the need for six people to buy six copies of NAV (dubious legality here, but if you're using one copy of Norton to scan the contents of your own LAN...hmmmm)...all sorts of random ideas and thoughts.
Thoughts, comments on what you could do with a trusted computing environment...
</ramble>
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
1 soldier wears the back pack and the others route their visual, audio and position info thru him to the others on the team.(with any one soldier being able to take over that position)
I could think of a few other uses as well, police (riot control, SWAT) gaming...(imagine setting up anywhere and people can join in no cables.."flash mob gaming")*phew*
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
My first thought -- "pointless art-for-art's-sake" crap.
:)
I read the website for a while. My second thought -- "oh, go hijack people at Starbuck's onto your Internet. Cute, immature crap."
I download the docs and read them, and buried deep within, it starts talking about geographically-based ad-hoc networks. Finally, a point. And quite a good one, actually.
The Internet's great and all, and it's not like you can't talk to a guy that's 20 feet away from you with it -- provided you know his (absolute) IP or hostname or something.
What this guy's talking about is being able to address people/things based on a relative measure -- geographical proximity to each other and this backpack. There are community tools on it to facilitate the coalescence of "instant communities" that can exchange very ephemeral information (broadcast a message saying you have beer to everyone in your section of the office) or use local resources ("print on the nearest printer").
It's not nearly as cool and avant-garde as this guy wants to think it is. It's not even new. (Jini, anyone?) He's applied more of a people angle on it, creating "communities" instead of just ad-hoc networks, and focusing on ways to make people interact with each other on the network -- or at least with the hoodlum who set it up.
It is a cool idea, though, IMO. Sometimes you want to talk to Jane or everyone in #slashdot, wherever she is or they are. And sometimes you want to talk to whoever (or whatever -- see the printer example) is nearby and (maybe) meets some other criteria.
It won't be remotely practical until the whole darn thing sits in the iPaq frontend, however.
It;s "internet" (little 'i') not "Internet" (big 'i'), and an internet is the conglomerate of two or more networks, so it wouldn't apply unless there were two guys with this rig floating in the same crowd.
I can see several exciting uses for this:
1. Spread a half-dozen of these floating rigs through a mass-demonstation/concert/march/fair, and let people find each other.
2. Same idea, but walk around a college campus and propagate a proximity-based contest, political viewpoint or research project (statistics based on respondents.)
3. Spider 100 major websites and then re-propagate the content to others, on subway and commuter trains.
4. How small can you make these things? Can you shrink wifi access point and itsy-bitsy webserver, antenna and power supply into something the size of a cigarette box? Take several hundred of these and drop over a moderately large area for propaganda, marketing or just to see what happens.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD