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?"

Comments

solution to american childs' weight problems?

[apachetoolbox]

1 more mile... xbox game almost done...

Re:Other uses..

[hyc]

Must be.

One of the principle benefits of The Internet has been the previously-unknown ability to easily connect to people independent of their geographical location.

So now this "invention" tries to create "geography dependent" networking. Duh, we call that a "LAN". The idea is as old as networking itself; LANs have existed and been used for meaningful work long before The Internet came around. This is just the same old LAN slightly warmed over.

Now personally, if I were wandering down the street, I would probably rather *speak* to the people I run into and wanted to interact with. It's a helluva lot faster than typing, and nothing beats face-to-face interaction for high bandwidth low-latency communication.

Again, the point of The Internet was to bring people together who otherwise had no other means to interact. When you're in the same room with a bunch of other people, you have many far superior channels at your disposal.

As for the wandering store-and-forward mail-server/filedrop/whatever. This is like copying a file to a floppy disk and walking down the hall to the next computer, we called this "sneakernet" - again, not a new idea. The implementation may be a little slicker now, being wireless and so not requiring physical access. But in actual utility, you haven't gained much.

Everyone knows the maximum range specs for 802.11 are under perfect conditions with no sunspot activity, etc., and in The Real World your range is far more limited. You don't get to surreptitiously walk through a crowd and disseminate tons of information undetectably - there's a non-trivial connect-time, and anything that takes longer than a few seconds to transfer is going to be obvious. People are going to need to walk the same direction as you in a crowd. They're going to have to stay close to you to avoid signal fade from intervening objects or people, and/or they're going to have to have their own diversity antennas. Everyone will stick out plainly, and anyone who cares to monitor/surveil these people will have an easy job of it.

I really really love neat new gadgets and cool uses of technology, but this is not neat, new, cool, or useful.