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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'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!
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 hope the remaining 25% are covered by Linksys routers.
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'!
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!
Prior art?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.