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Wi-Fi Warsailing In The Netherlands
Roland writes "The first war-sailing event ever, AFAIK. A community based WiFi network in Leiden, the Netherlands, WirelessLeiden hold a warsailing event [Dutch links]. The war-sailing event was meant to show that WirelessLeiden is more than just a local city network. On this map you can see that 75% of the route was covered by WirelessLeiden. Vic Hayes, the Father of WiFi, was a keynote speaker during the war-sailing event. He gave a talk about how WiFi was developed. A couple of spin-offs gave presentations, namely AnyWi and KoGeRo. FYI: WirelessLeiden [English Link] has rolled out a free WiFi network covering almost the whole city of Leiden, 100.000 inhabitants, 49 nodes with 30 more to be build this year. This is the NodeMap of WirelessLeiden."
Thats awesome but: "The war-sailing event was meant to show that WirelessLeiden is more than just a local city network." how is it more than just a local city network?
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
Gonna need a waterproof laptop for that sort of thing...
I recently got back from the Netherlands, and let me be the first to say that they are the most security concious people WRT wireless I've ever been around. I've traveled in the US, Germany, Canada, the UK, and Italy extensively. Netherlands, hands down the best. Italy...let me put it this way: Italy go? Free surf all Day-go :)
I'm guessing its wardriving but on boats ;-P Wardriving is driving around and looking for hotspots (places you can connect WiFi).
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
100 People with an accuracy of three decimal points. Now that's news!
My guess would be that it's a bit like wardriving, only involving water and fewer wheels. Either that or it's a fancy word for what a Navy does.
Piracy on the open seas.
Well I can't read whatever language the web page is in.. But from the one picture I saw, and the map, it aint sailing.
Sailing is when you have a boat with a sail, and the boat move as the result of wind power.
What they seem to be doing is 'warboating'.
As far as I can tell from the map there is no way a sail boat could get around that route.
stuff
I'm guessing either:
1. A pacifist, as in sick of wars (Wars = more than one war, Ailing = to feel ill), or 2. Like wardriving, but while sailing.
Something tells me its going to be the latter
I hope the remaining 25% are covered by Linksys routers.
I wonder if this is related to this T-Shirt?
42
um, this warsailing is taking place in the Netherlands; that's dutch, not swedish.
Must resist "American-doesn't-know-geography" jibe...
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
if you look at this map it shows the coverage of waterways around a city with wifi access. so, i'm assuming warsailing would be sailing around in ones boat looking for a hotspot...
It's slashdot, what did you expect?
There's a big difference between picking up a wifi network and acutally maintaining a usable link. IMHO a lot of this "Warflying" and "Warsailing" crap serves no real purpose. In a way the less sensitive your antenna is the more acurate the location of a network is mapped. In way I am playing devils advocate and in another it is my opinion.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ahoy Matey! Welcome aboard the Black Perl. We be the Software Pirates of the Caribbean, hoist the wi-fi and start the mp3 piratin'!
This concern anyone else?
When the inevitable gust of wind capsizes the sailboat (happend to me so often when I was learning to sail that I started leaving my wallet onshore)? Does a laptop, when it gets wet and shorts out, start working again when it dries out like a cell phone?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There has been way too much emphasis on wireless "security" lately, and almost none on the subversive possibilities of wireless networking. Every time I see a city is putting up a wireless network, I get excited. More and more of the commercial wireless companies are starting to give up on their business models, because giving out wireless bandwidth is cheap and easy.
Seriously, the advent of free wireless, whether municipal or "lilypad", means that the internet is becoming a technology with increasingly low entrance requirements. Find an old laptop, run Linux, and start a blog.
If you're going to worry about security, do it on the machines. Leave the network infrastructure alone. Rawk!
And that wasw after a cycle in the dryer.
Prior art?
i mean 100,000 people all on [insert p2p of choice] will use huge amounts of bandwidth, who pays for this if its free ?
Wifi is easy to set up. ($50 at the local electronics mega-mart gives you a decent AP)
The big problem isn't the "wifi" part - it's the other half - the "Intarweb" half. See, the real expense is the Internet connection.
If I share my ADSL 1.5/384 connection with my neighbors, I'm violating terms of service, and could lose my (very important to me) Internet connection.
T1 or T3 lines, which wouldn't have the above contract restrictions, cost at least $750/month around here.
So, who provides the bandwidth? Also, assume that somebody uses YOUR wifi AP to email bomb threats to King George, WITH YOUR RETURN ADDRESS.
Now, who's in HOT WATER?
I personally think that sooner, rather than later, Internet Access will be more of a public service, provided by your Municipality. In many areas, this already happens.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Who's going to be first to go warsubmarining?
So if you go to war with a country to find their hotspots, is that warwaring?
there is a spam-bomb onboard, and if the boat goes slower than 10 knots an hour, it will explode!!
Well, we have wardriving and warflying..., and now warsailing. What's next? Warspelunking in hell?
1. Locate a boat.
2. Release the docklines.
3. Start the motor and or raise sails.
4. Catch up.
5. Maneuver to within boarding distance.
6. Sucessfully board without falling in the water, or being repelled.
7. Commence with the beatdown on a rolling, pitching, heeled deck.
Oh yeah,
8. Profit!.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Wardriving (and warsailing), like wardialing before them, are by nature malicious. If someone's providing these wireless networks, the people using them aren't warsailing.
~J
FreeWarFalling
of course, maybe some one has done it already.
I've warsailed in the hudson river a few months ago.
While taking a ferry from NJ to Wall St, I ran macstumbler on my powerbook.
Voila! There's about two accesspoints smack dab in the middle of the river.
The number increases as it reaches the docks..
Check out wardriving maps of the US at location based wifi headquarters. Upload your findings, and see data from other wardrivers. Of course it's a shameless plug, but at least it's on topic!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I could definitely see something like this cropping up in the Long Island Sound and becoming quite popular with Long Island boaters who want a relaxing day on the water. I know someone was looking at hotspots in the water around NYC, and I'm sure there are already plenty of those :D
But...knowing entrepreneurship in the United States, I simply can't envision a free Wi-Fi network with range good enough to cover a body of water. In general, it seems like phenomena like this one in the Netherlands are seen more often in Europe, so where does it leave us unpriveliged Americans?
Insert witty comment here
Gives new meaning to pirating internet
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
But I've had success with Nokia. They have good insulation from water. Some others have been known to go dead.
Wireless Bin Leiden held a war... war... warsomethingorother... damn. Lost in transition.
I spend my summers boating in the Pacific Northwest. I've been "warsailing" for two years now. Whenever I settle down in a new marina for the night, or even a cove with houses around it, I boot up and see what king of internet access I can get. More often than not, I'm able to hop on someone's network -- usually a Linksys router at the default settings. Sometimes it may be from a liveaboard boat w/ cable access (yes, they have that now in marinas), but most of the time it's from a nearby house. The signals seem to travel really well across water -- hundreds of yards.
Most better marinas have paid WiFi now. Others have somewhere you can jack in your laptop. Still others have internet cafes nearby, which capitalize on the large boater market -- everyone relies on email these days. Small marinas are starting to offer free WiFi. Internet access has become an important feature for attracting business. And there's nothng better than surfing the net from your own boat.
One beautiful evening last summer, I was sitting on the foredeck of my boat, with my laptop and a glass of red wine, reading my email while enjoying the fabulous view of the BC coastal range. It was a surreal, TV-commercial moment -- priceless! Yes, this is for real. We really can live like this these days.
War-driving, war-flying, war-sailing... when was the last time you heard someone trying to get a cellphone signal refer to is as cell-driving, etc?
Just because you've changed the vehicle doesn't mean you've changed the technical achievements.
Any idea if they used NetStumbler for this little project?
Silly continental Europeans who don't know about the outside world.
It's true that in continental Europe, the period is used as a 10^3 separator, and the comma is used as a decimal separator, but this is hardly universal usage, and certainly the opposite is not a provincial Americanism. Using the comma fora 10^3 separator and the period for a decimal separator is in fact standard English usage, and is what is followed in the UK, Australia, Singapore, India, and South Africa, among other countries, in addition to the US.
Hell, even some other languages use it, like Japanese.
I suppose just because you got lucky with the metric system and "football", you assume whenever continental Europe and the US differ, it's continental Europe on the "international" side. =P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was born there :P. Somewhat surprised to find a map showing my sleepy homevillage. Anyway, with small boats (16^2 meter sails) you can perfectly well sail there. Larger boats will have to wait for the bridges to open up, so that'd be somewhat awkward sailing, except on the upper bit of the map (called Kaag), which is wide open, and a popular sailing place.
Enjoy.
:). It is wide enough for a small boat. And yes, it's tacking (laveren I think is the dutch translation) every 30 meter or so, but if you're sailing in the rivers or channels that connect the lakes in the netherlands there's usually tacking involved.
:)
f ig /fotos/events/wifi_te_water/tn/koningin_juliana002 3.jpg
:)
Anyway, looking at the page, I don't think they used a sailboat, just a boat. Shame
http://wleiden.webweaving.org:8080/svn/node-con
That's the boat they used. Severely lacking sails
Leiden is a small (110,000 inhabitants) city in the west of the Netherlands. Its main claim to fame is its university (430 years old now and going strong). We get a lot of american tourists since Leiden was the location where the pilgrim fathers lived before taking ship to what would one day be the USA. Every year I get to disappoint a couple of americans coming over for a visit: only a few remnants of walls remain of that church (and for some reason they are always asking _me_ where it is!?). But do keep coming - there is lots of other stuff to see ;-)
The area to the north of Leiden has a lot of open water (small connected lakes), and makes for excellent sailing. Around the lakes is where we grow all those flower bulbs. For a rural area it has one of the highest population densities in the world, which helps explain the proliferation of wireless access spots I guess.
The office where I work is just about on top of one of the access points: "Rabo" is about 20m away from where I sit. When we tried last year we couldn't pick up any signals, but I'll try again today, see if it actually works now.
Wireless technology uses capacitors, the modern descendants of the device known as a Leiden jar, invented two and a half centuries ago.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Errrm ... from the english-for-germans dept.
WTF?
some hidden joke here I don't get?
I thought we're talking about the Netherlands...
The area covered by the entirely wireless network goes far beyond the city limits: from the North Sea beach to approximately 20 miles inland. And including the lake district.
Find a laptop, run Linux, be a dork?
You should've never finished that sentence
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Well - As you can see on the map it covers not just the City of Leiden - but has also spawned copy cat initiatives which are building out in the adjacent villages - all the way till the sea. Dw.
So, we have had war-driving, war-flying and now war-sailing. Not much left to do. How about some war-fucking? Have as many one night stands as you like, take your Wi-Fi equipment with you and dive into it:
# pump -i dck01
The girls will really like it, when you start to discuss their signal-to-noise-ratio after you're done. And don't forget to publicly announce each open access point you've found :o)
that's german, not dutch :-P
My experience with this is limited to Qalcomm and Nokia phones- but I wouldn't have expected EITHER of them to survive a high-heat dryer. Boards can become desoldered at those temperatures. But both, left to dry out over a couple of days, still worked.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And it is not the first ever warboating event. Last year a group of about 20 nerds did a warfloating event in the canals of Amsterdam, and as far as i know the first ever warfloating was done in 2001 by the artist Franz Feigl: http://www.free2air.org/story/2001/9/15/115017/225