A Wi-Fi/VoIP Phone Booth In the Burning Man Desert

Brad Templeton writes "I, (of EFF/ClariNet/rec.humor.funny) along with Brent Chapman (Majordomo/Building Internet Firewalls) and the satellite dish of John Gilmore (EFF/Cygnus/Cypherpunks/etc.) put together an engaging hack -- a battery-powered free phone booth using 802.11, VoIP and a satellite IP uplink. This was placed in the desert at the Burning Man arts festival deep in the remote Nevada Black Rock playa, exactly where you wouldn't expect a working phone booth to be. With cheap VoIP people were able to call all over the world. The reactions of people to such incongruous technology were great fun and emotional as well. There's a page about the phone including details of building it and live experiences including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"

Comments

Jerry Maguire

[rpbailey1642]

...including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"

Mmmm, you had me at naked.

Free porn?

[shfted!]

There's a page about the phone including details of building it and live experiences including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"

Never underestimate the power of horny nerds.

But I gotta ask... would this lower my 1-900 bills?

Re:Free porn?

[AKnightCowboy]

Never underestimate the power of horny nerds.

Because one major thing the Internet lacks is unlimited access to free pornography. Just this morning I was thinking to myself: "Self... wouldn't it be cool if some entrepreneur put pictures of naked women on the Internet? Then we wouldn't have to visit those skanky adult bookstores in the seedy district anymore."

Who am I kidding though... if pornography was available on the Internet, how would we keep children from gaining access to it? Our entire society could collapse.

As if...

[alexcampbell]

"including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology"
As if photos of naked people could ever be gratuitous to Slashdot readers!

Cool

[pHatidic]

If you want to read a great story about Burning Man then read this, from Kuro5hin. One of the best stories from that site in a while.

congrats

[mrpuffypants]

and it did. you're truly lucky. please, next time, don't have the connection for your server reside in a phone booth in the desert.

Results of new server stress-test:

[Anonymous Coward]

Failure at three comments.

Re:Results of new server stress-test:

[grozzie2]

Lots of folks are under the mistaken impression that a /. attack takes out servers. It rarely does that. What it does do, is totally flood the incoming/outgoing network pipe. If your server is on the far side of a t-1 or equivalent connection, the connection doesn't stand a chance, and the episode ends up being just like a distributed syn flood, all the incoming connections, but not enough bandwidth to deliver the responses. *nix boxes tend to survive fine, some flavours of windows boxes will do the bsod in this case, tcpip stack blows buffers in ring0 driver code. OTOH, if you are sitting in a data center with a 100 mbit connection to the upstream router, which has gigabit feeds to the internet, you should have no problem withstanding the onslaught of the /. crowd.

I will admit, on a new server, this is a pretty slick trick to stress test the whole system. Just suggest nudie pics available to the /. crowd, sit back, and watch to see if the upstream routers can deal with the loads. It's a far better way to see if your upstream providers have problems than sitting back and waiting till there's real business/money on the line. I've got a new load balanced cluster going live for a client in a couple weeks, probly gonna steal a page from your book here, I've always known the /. test was a good one, never thought to spice the blurb with the hint of nudie pics.

Re:Nice but,

[Aadain2001]

It's my opinion that the equipment in places like hospitals should design themselves to be hit by a nuke and still function. If something like a little WiFi+VoIP causes an piece of equipment to stop working then the equipment needs to be replaces/reengineered, because WiFi is here to stay and VoIP is gaining momentum, so it will have to be done sooner or later.

Not convenient for me

[zaxios]

If I'm out of change, it's probably easier to go home and get some than walk deep into a Nevada desert for a free call. A good idea but some more thought could have gone into it, in my opinion.

Do the Math

[serutan]

naked pictures + slashdot = horked server

Burning Man Website Down.

[alan_dershowitz]

Linking to public nudity pics on Slashdot is not advised. Guess I'll have to settle for "Burning Server".

don't need to read the article

[kLaNk]

pictures of nudity at burning man? STAY AWAY!

Sick Bastard

[IamGarageGuy 2]

A post to /. with reference to nudity. Just to stress test a server. What, are you sick? I don't care what you are running - it just can't be done. If this link lasts for more than 20 minutes, this guy should be given a medal and hired by the US government on the spot.

Google Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:pj83shgh248J:ww w.templetons.com/pq/playa.html+&hl=en&client=firef ox-a/

Douglas Adams, where areyou now?

[davejenkins]

If we ever really needed a telephone sanitizer... this would be it.

cool idea

[Chuck Bucket]

Most ppl that I know that have gone to burning man focus on the lack of technology, or at least a misuse of current technology, as a gateway to experimentation. This turns that ideal on it's head...I wonder, did he stick around the phone, or just set it up and watch from a distance? I'd like to see the reactions of folks when they realize that the phone worked, and wasn't just a prop.

CB^%&*(__.

Re:cool idea

[pixel.jonah]

I think your estimation is 1/2 right: unlike say the rainbow gathering - the BM crowd is quite tech heavy - Space battle ships built on ram 3500 trucks with turreted fire cannons? giant 16' solar (and battery) powered tricycles? Extremly powerful lasers? yeah - some pretty cool s**t out there!

Emotional reactions to technology?

[ShatteredDream]

One day I'd love to get a chance to go to Burning Man, especially seeing blurbs on Reason Online about how one of the editors went and loved it. Anyway, what I don't get is why people would see something like VoIP as an issue. VoIP/Wifi are of course made by corporations, but they aren't **run** by corporations necessarily.

There seems to be too much of a false dichotomy that is present. Either you're an artsy, expressive person or you're one of those technology nerds that is cold to creativity. Maybe the worst nightmare to the artsy extremists is the idea that they don't have a monopoly on aesthetics anymore than the nerds on functionality. Would not the greatest triumph be a blending of beauty and functionality? Of course, harmonization of the two would naturally result in the nerds and artsy types having to meet half-way and *gasp* learn to communicate and appreciate each other.

But then what do I know? I'm one of the only geeks in my CS department that can actually excel at human languages while suffering in my math skills. I picked up basic scheme programming in one or two classes and finished the projects quickly, and beat most of the math people because my brain is more used to switching between fairly starkly different logic paradigms. Going between English and Spanish requires more mental flexibility than from C->Java.

At this point I just don't understand why people who pride themselves on how well-developed their intellects are would limit themselves instead of building on that so they could stay on top. I am just reminded of some of the math nerds, whose coding skills aren't as good as mine, said that a math minor should be a prereq. When I retorted, "fine then let's add a foreign language minor since that would be just as useful for helping programmers think flexibly" they just... shut up.

Nerds, go to a coffee shop when local bands are jamming and maybe take an artsy chick out to a musical or something. Artsy types, try math, programming, anything to gain an appreciation for the value of logic. It'd do so many of you good.

Re:Emotional reactions to technology?

[btempleton]

Actually, a lot of Burning Man is about the marriage of art and technology. There's no fear of tech, and it's proof that there are lots of people who do combine technology and art. That's part of why I go. I do too many projects at Burning Man. Some are pure tech as art (like the phone.) Some are a mixture like digital photography. One I did this year was a star map, which while I used Photoshop to build it, was really 99% graphic arts. And many others are like this.

Re:Emotional reactions to technology?

[metlin]

You raised a valid point, but I have just one problem with the artsy folks - they wear their non-technical fronts as something of an identity.

I play in a band, and I'm the only technical person in it. However, the rest of them take PRIDE in the fact that they cannot, or rather, will not - do math or science.

On the other hand, almost all the technical people I've seen make a conscious effort at *something* artsy or the other (languages, music, painting, dramatics, martial arts, etc) - something or the other, at the very least. And they are seldom proud of the fact that they cannot do artsy stuff - I've always wished that I could paint or do dramatics.

That is a kind of defeatist attitude, especially since communiation has to be two way - it does not help if only the geeks made an effort to get into arts, there has to be cooperation from the other side, too.

No solar power?

[jeffs72]

Preamble: I'd rtfa but the site is /.'d right now. I'm suprised to not see any mention of this thing being solar powered with a decent rechargable battery system attached.

Call me crazy, but a wireless based phone booth in the middle of a desert just begs for solar power, then it's truely a portable, viable option for these types of gatherings, plus public beaches during vacation season, etc. Heck the department of natural resources could put them out on hiking trails and bring them back in during the winter

But all that would require the thing to not require an electricty plug where ever you needed it. If you're going to go through the trouble of providing 120volts whats the point?

Re:No solar power?

[btempleton]

There was some mention as I recall about debating solar powering it. Part of the mystique of it was to look like a phone booth sticking out of the desert, yet with no wires, no power going into it. (Alas, we did have to expose a small 802.11 antenna.)

So a solar panel could have been added but it would have been out of place on the image I wanted to create. Indeed, one way to do the panel would be just a bit more powerful than the phone needed, so to recharge the battery a bit, and then just die when the battery ran out, and start again at dawn.

A traditional (superman) booth could have a panel on the roof that nobody would see, though a horizontal panel is not as efficient as one tilted to the latitude.

Mod Parent -1 Insecure Prick

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus you are a fucking prick who's stuck on themself. Plenty of CS majors are well-read, speak foreign languages, etc., but most of them don't put up page-long posts to Slashdot about how cool and well-rounded they are, and about how more people should be like them, and do the things they like to do.

Re:Nice but,

[Scrameustache]

It's my opinion that the equipment in places like hospitals should design themselves

Working on AI nanotech, are we?

Re:how did they get the bandwidth to work???

[btempleton]

It's a Tachyon dish, 2 megabits down, 512k up. The latency is annoying, but you can work around it if the parties know not to speak on top of one another.