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Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors
A few days ago, Dan Rutter (the Dan in "Dan's Data") published an interesting idea for extending the sort of philanthropic technical pranksterism that spawned throwies by applying the same approach to Wi-Fi. That means, looking what he hopes is not too far down the road, creating Wi-Fi repeaters that are cheap enough to deploy on the sly and frugal enough with power to run on solar power or cheaply replaceable batteries. But as he says, "If you've got a lot of spare money, a ladder and no respect for private property, though, you could already be stealthily deploying Open-Mesh or other such gadgets all over your neighbourhood." In some cities at least, you'd be hard pressed to ever avoid at least one available wireless access point, but that's not the experience for most people, most places -- which bears correction.
Whats to say that the open network isn't already sniffing for passwords ect.
Using wi-fi hardware to make a wi-fi network is hacking now?
So? Years back, "service" was intended for one computer. We got ourselves routers because it was quite silly that providers were charging on a per computer basis. It just didn't make sense. Yes, some bits were different, but it were still just that, bits. Story is still the same now.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
You need to make sure that the boxes are cheap and plentiful, so that stealing them is about as exciting as stealing a plastic bag from a supermarket.
If it's done right (e.g. using mesh networking technology), breaking just a few nodes should not cause an outage.
How much battery would be required to run something like a WRT54GL at reasonable latitudes assuming the only external power input is solar? I would think that the batteries and solar cells would be the more attractive things to steal, and if you can make them as cheap as plastic bags from a supermarket then you've solved a whole load more problems than community wireless