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Coming Soon to a Wireless Hotspot Near You: Ads
mindless4210 writes "A new generation of spam is born with the launch of FreeFi's new Wi-Fi advertising network. It is the first service of its kind, with intentions of delivering ad content to hotspots around the world starting in mid-Summer. FreeFi's President, Lawrence Laffer, says that the service displays a 'persistent set of ads adjacent to the user's browser without use of invasive advertising software or pop-up ads.' He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'" This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
At least in Brazil, there are many ad-based, free dialup ISPs. Many on business for more than 2 years, and doing well.
morcego
That's not necessarily true. They could set up the access point to run all connections through a proxy, or even run the wireless access point as a proxy, which basically would allow the computer to change web pages on the fly. So they could force all content to resize into a frame (or iframe, or table, or do any of a number of HTML tricks) on whatever portion of the screen they allocate for content, and then put the ad bar in. Or they could create a flash "float over" ad bar. Or they could do any of a number of things to modify the web page, without requiring the user to install any special software at all. Note this would even allow you to play games / whatever online, because it would only modify traffic going over port 80, and then only modify HTML.
Long ago I took up updating my hosts file with data from http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ which provides a list of known ad servers that you then point back to your local machine.
I decided to take this one step further and change the mapped to IP to be that of SCO, so that each time I come to Slashdot and don't see their ads, I instead see a small bit of the SCO homepage, what you might call a mini DoS
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Right, so they modify the html. And firefox modifies it right back to where it came from with my handy dandy user-content.css. If they work some evil magik that gets around it I'll just use that adblock extension. Remember, there is NO WAY to stop the determined geek.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
A coffee shop (or any business, or private party) can't just hook up a cablemodem and resell their bandwidth. Their ISP would have a fucking FIT. It's against their Terms of Service.
Generally, you don't get to resell your cablemodem bandwidth. You might be able to work out a deal with your ISP, but you'll definitely be paying more than $70.
I have yet to see a cablemodem provider that doesn't offer "business class". You're right about the $70 being low, but if the lowest grade of business class service they offer is greater than about $200-$250, I'd be freakin' shocked.
And those Terms of Service do allow reselling, or at least use in a such a way as to allow something like internet for your customers. That's the whole point of getting business class service in the first place.
Low end business class in my area runs around $150, gives you 6mbit down, 1.5 up, and yes, you can resell to your greedy little hearts content.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.