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The Rise of Free Urban Internet (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the rising-pattern dept.

Intersection, the Alphabet-backed smart cities startup known for creating free internet kiosks for cities, is pushing to make free internet accessible in as many major cities as possible across the globe. From a report: As more aspects of our daily lives -- from healthcare to communication to travel -- become dependent on internet-connected devices, the concept of providing internet as a public good is becoming more widespread. Intersection is best known for its successful transformation of NYC's 7,500 pay-phones into free internet kiosks that act as hot-spots and advertising space. It's also spreading its programs to cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and even London. The program is entirely funded by advertising that the company sells on LinkNYC internet kiosks, so less densely-populated cities may be a tougher sell.

78 comments

  1. Don't you want Google to run your city? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    People are dumb.

    http://babylonbee.com/news/go-wrong-amazon-key-asks-man-whos-never-watched-single-sci-fi-film/

    1. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People are dumb.

      http://babylonbee.com/news/go-wrong-amazon-key-asks-man-whos-never-watched-single-sci-fi-film/

      edison was a drug addict, so let's throw out everything he ever made

    2. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by forkfail · · Score: 0

      That has to be one of the most mind jarring non sequiturs I've ever witnessed.

      I feel somehow diminished for having been exposed to this abysmal logical failure.

      --
      Check your premises.
    3. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by Desler · · Score: 2

      You’re posting that ironically, right? Babylon Bee is a satire site...

    4. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by HiThere · · Score: 1

      It *is* a problem. I really think the internet should be a public utility managed at the local level, but most towns don't have the expertise to put up a good one. I'm really not sure that Google is a good alternative, but if you think of them as an alternative to AT&T or Verison, well, they don't look that bad.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    5. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by OYAHHH · · Score: 1

      > but most towns don't have the expertise to put up a good one. I'm really not sure that Google is a good alternative

      I've seen in Mountain View what Google calls their public internet provided by them. It isn't pretty. In fact it is terrible.

      Not a fan of ATT or Verizon, but at least they have a profit motive to actually provide something that at least works somewhat.. Versus a non-working Google setup.

      --
      Caution: Contents under pressure
    6. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

      I thought ATT and Version were better because they sell us a product instead of making us the product?

      At least that's what I read allot on Slashdot.

      I don't mind being a product and getting free stuff as long as I am aware of it first :)

    7. Re:Don't you want Google to run your city? by HiThere · · Score: 1

      What grounds do you have for believing that they don't make their customers a product as well as demanding that they get paid.

      As I said, I feel the internet should be a local utility. I'm just skeptical that the local jurisdictions will have the skills and commitment to actually run it. In that case there would be an internet bill just like there is a water bill or a garbage collection bill.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  2. “The Public Good” by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    Sure, and the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized... right?

    Give me a break. At least be honest about your motivation.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:“The Public Good” by gnick · · Score: 4, Interesting

      the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    2. Re:“The Public Good” by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Beware of billionaires bearing "free" gifts.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:“The Public Good” by kelemvor4 · · Score: 1

      the information flowing through these “free” access points isn’t going to be collected and monetized

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      Uh-huh.. because VPN ISP's would never "monetize" your information or your bandwidth, right?

    4. Re:“The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just because you picked a shitty VPN and got Pwned doesn't mean we were all so stupid. Pick a reputable VPN.

    5. Re: “The Public Good” by reanjr · · Score: 1

      Encryption much?

    6. Re:“The Public Good” by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

      Trust your VPN, not your ISP.

      LOL no, you can't trust your VPN either.
      At current, you can't trust the Internet at all. Regardless of how you're connecting to it, always assume at all times that you're being monitored, all traffic logged, analyzed, sniffed at, and scrutinized, for one purpose or another, and that you're constantly under either direct (as in from live hackers) or indirect (as in from a 'bot or bot-net or hacked website) attack. Think of it this way: The Internet may or may not have AIDS, so you're taking a risk consorting with it.

    7. Re: “The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cool, the kiosk has detcted incompatible encryption and blocked that connection.

    8. Re:“The Public Good” by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      Actually, since we're on Slashdot and all, the instruction should be:
      Install your own VPN server and use that on all public networks. It's not that hard.
      - https://openvpn.net/index.php/...
      - https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/h...
      - https://play.google.com/store/...

    9. Re:“The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it's not a matter of which VPN software, but rather, 'who' is the access provider you contracted to be the other end of your VPN tunnel; for it is that provider which is the entry point into the Internet, and can monitor various aspects of your vpn traffic.

    10. Re: “The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup, i setup my own vpn and trust it pretty well.

    11. Re: “The Public Good” by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

      So you route your own traffic through your own internet service? Isn't that redundant?

    12. Re: “The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're an idiot if you think just because a VPN has tricked you with nice advertising that they give a crap about your privacy. Plenty of highly reputable VPN providers turned out to be logging when they said they weren't. And if you use your own VPN how do you know your connection out from the VPN isn't being monitored. This isn't as simple a problem as you seem to think.

    13. Re:“The Public Good” by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If your smartphone battery goes flat while you are travelling to an interview (thanks to location tracking apps), then you are completely disconnected from the world - can't talk to the interviewing company or the recruitment agent. Regular phone boxes aren't much use as they have moved to pre-paid cards on sale at newsagents. Just being able to look up a a map, find taxi rank, book a taxi or even use a google search to find a telephone number and make a call would be enough.

  3. It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

    1. Re:It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

    2. Re:It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

      Going to the movies is not free because they charge admission. And don't even get me started about the price of popcorn.

    3. Re:It's no free by drnb · · Score: 1

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

      The park visitors aren't identified and their habits put into a database.

    4. Re:It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's just a spectrum of detail. At what point is it too much and at what point don't you care?

    5. Re:It's no free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not free if they are tracking and selling your browsing habits.

      going to the park is not free because they count the visitors

      The park visitors aren't identified and their habits put into a database.

      They are if the park is in China.

  4. No beatings for disabling the telescreen by forkfail · · Score: 1

    We're all more than happy - falling over ourselves, really - to put those wires on ourselves and train MAC III right up.

    --
    Check your premises.
    1. Re:No beatings for disabling the telescreen by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Fiction is generally bad a doing a forecast of reality, and that one sounds less likely than most. Even BladeRunner sounds more likely.

      Please note: The dystopian stories are usually even worse at forecasting than the utopian ones. You can point at pieces of 1984 or Brave New World that are mirrored in the current world, but you can also pick out pieces of various utopian ones. At the current point in time the dystopian predictions seem the most accurate, but in much of the past it's been the utopian ones. (Though not the parts that predict essential changes in human nature.)

      OTOH, if one of the really dystopian predictions ever does become actualized, then there won't be any way back.

      P.S.: Do you consider "Oath of Fealty" a Utopian novel or a Dystopian one?

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    2. Re:No beatings for disabling the telescreen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      this future sounds more tarded than most

    3. Re:No beatings for disabling the telescreen by forkfail · · Score: 1

      Sea of Glass was better than the Wikipedia article might have indicated. It read well, and the idea of predictive analytics at scale was very well done.

      Your millage may vary.

      PS: At one time, I considered Oath of Fealty Utopian. Not so much anymore.

      --
      Check your premises.
  5. Really not free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So maybe the end users don't directly pay specifically for the service. Somehow all that bandwidth, infrastructure and maintenance is being paid for somehow. In many major cities internet is freely available at many establishments anyway so is city wide internet really needed? Seems to me the real benefit of city wide internet is where internet access publicly is limited and private internet service is not widely available. This is like a gas station on every corner. Is this really needed and a good way to spend public funds?

    1. Re:Really not free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is why we need Head Tax like Seattle!

      Internet is a basic human right, like having a car and food and stuff.

      People like you should not be allowed to say bad things about rights like this!

      No more comments, please.

    2. Re: Really not free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a kiosk. Probably built as cheaply as possible and connected to the poverty rate internet. 10Mbps is like $13 a month, so they aren't even charitable at all. This is like that rich family that hands out tiny boxes of raisins for Halloween. Except they want you to check in every day.

      And what part of "entirely funded by advertising" did you not understand? Why do you even mention public funds? Cuz you didn't even skim the summary.

  6. An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 2

    ...for a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure. For instance, how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)? Infrastructure is just about deployed enough that a slow, strange, ad-hoc hack-job internet could be built without any telcos or government whatsoever.

    1. Re:An interesting experiement... by olsmeister · · Score: 1

      How long until such a system gets hacked or abused? How would you troubleshoot problems? Do you want your WiFi continuously saturated with traffic passing through from God-knows-where?

    2. Re:An interesting experiement... by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Sounds complicated and unreliable, when 4G already works like a charm.

    3. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go ahead and do it. I have heard about this pipe dream for so long I fail to understand why it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because it doesn't scale up? Maybe because an internet limited to your immediate neighbourhood makes no sense? Because wifi does not reach through kilometers, you know.

    4. Re:An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 1

      4G does work like a charm; considerably better than an ad-hoc internet over consumer wifi WAP's. But the notion of an internet that doesn't depend on any corporate or sovereign gatekeepers is intriguing.

    5. Re:An interesting experiement... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Go ahead and do it. I have heard about this pipe dream for so long I fail to understand why it hasn't happened yet. Maybe because it doesn't scale up?

      There are two main problems. One, you have to convince people to serve as repeaters for others, and cooperation is not something most of us are taught. Only jocks get taught the value of cooperation in school, but they're taught to only cooperate with a handful of people who wear the same costume. Two, it's much harder to profit from, so there's no corporate interest. Corporations and other bureaucracies like small numbers of points of control so that they can keep that control.

      There are numerous mesh network projects, and many of them can be used for real purposes, like bot swarms. But getting nationwide coverage is going to be a long, long time coming.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ever try using Tor? Now multiply the slowness that is Tor times 1,000. You'd be lucky to get 300 baud.

    7. Re:An interesting experiement... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      I think you're talking about a mesh network. They don't scale well, and with increased size the number of necessary hops climbs. Mesh networks work well on a small scale, but with increasing users they work less well even if you don't distribute them geographically. When you start adding in geographic distribution, I would expect the lag to be worse than O(n^2) where n is the number of concurrent users.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    8. Re:An interesting experiement... by TheZeitgeist · · Score: 1

      Yeah, it would be latency-palooza for such a homwbrewed internet. It would also be slow. It would not be optimal. Fortnight would suck on it. I get all that. What is interesting to me though is this notion of an actual 'underground internet' that is independent of any telco provider, or government sanction. Such a thing would be a godsend for citizens of places like Iran or Venezuela; and would drive their security services bonkers - and not because of the latency time.

    9. Re: An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They already have that in Cuba.

      It's called a backpack full of hard drives.

      Actually I heard they also pass around and duplicate various "internet on a thumb drive" thingies. Those are probably just ripped YouTube videos and memes though.
      Maybe a ripped hacker bulletin board for studying old school stuff.

    10. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Herewith I recount a tale from Ye Olde Internet from the end of the 20th century.

      The dorms at my college had crappy internet, and the evil and clueless administration wasn't doing anything about it. A 100MB pipe sounded awesome, until you have to share it with two thousand other schmucks, all trying to p2p as much stuff as their harddrives could hold. Online gaming was out of the question with ping times in the thousands and 40% packet loss.

      Luckily the campus IT team had planned for 100MBs to every socket, and so over the local network it was virtually lag free and near theoretical transfer speeds for 100baseT. A few enterprising CompSci students thought it'd be fun to set up their own p2p network, limited to the dorms. It started with a couple of nerds swapping poorly encoded, dutch-subtitled Start Trek TNG episodes back and forth, but over a frighteningly short period of time it became THE place to go to get stuff. Lecturers would give students course material to share on the network, clubs started using it to share their newsletters, the works. Everyone - from the pharma chicks to the sports science bros - was online and sharing over the network. The Administration turned a blind eye to the rampant piracy, possibly because the lack of external access rendered entertainment-mafia shakedowns less likely, and possibly because the amount of external bandwidth in use fell through the floor.

      Because the local network was the fastest way to get anything, it was the first place you looked, and so only one copy of any large external resource was ever downloaded. From a performance point of view, it was as though the network had a cache the size of terabytes - far beyond the budget of the college's beleaguered IT services department. With the external traffic limited to web pages, congestion became a thing of the past, web browsing became lightning fast, and a generation of twitch-FPS gamers had thee golden years of millisecond pings with which to p0wn n3wb5 all over the world.

      The moral of this story is that even small-scale open networks can share external links with amazing efficiency. A sufficiently advanced protocol for anonymous data sharing and caching could make telco-less internet viable.

    11. Re:An interesting experiement... by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      Multi-hop Mobil ad-hoc networks. Like BATMAN or Netsukuku.

      a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure

      That's not the definition of open-source, but I get what you're saying. I think you mean "indie" or distributed.

      how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?

      Assuming everyone all ran the same friendly software on their cell phones and wifi routers, you could get to the edge of town. You would be stopped once you hit a rural environment. In NYC, that would include Jersey, but not Florida.

      And yeah, it's slow and laggy with minimal throughput. But it's pretty awesome in a pinch. But of course not everyone would play along. MANETS aren't really a replacement for Internet infrastructure, but they're really interesting for that last-mile. If you have enough people that let neighbors mooch off your land-line or cell service, I think it'd be a viable.

    12. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Said networks would never leave a metro region. You know how many miles of desolate land there is between new york and florida and with wifi only having range in the hundreds of feet you would never get though those regions of desolate land. Least not without setting up dedicated wifi relay points where you might get 30ish miles of range over parabolic reflector antennas, and a bandwidth that would probably be unsustainable for the intended use.

      If it comes to the relay points, you are basically talking about reconstructing the AT&T microwave relay system of the '50s-'80s. Good luck without a major backer, probably a telco. Maybe AT&T will sell you their old relay towers.

    13. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe this will give you sorta of an idea of what would be involved

      https://99percentinvisible.org/article/vintage-skynet-atts-abandoned-long-lines-microwave-tower-network/

    14. Re:An interesting experiement... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The dorms at my college had crappy internet, and the evil and clueless administration wasn't doing anything about it. A 100MB pipe sounded awesome, until you have to share it with two thousand other schmucks, all trying to p2p as much stuff as their harddrives could hold. Online gaming was out of the question with ping times in the thousands and 40% packet loss.

      a generation of twitch-FPS gamers had thee golden years of millisecond pings with which to p0wn n3wb5 all over the world

      It's so different now. Several decades ago my Uni only had a few 1Gb trunks. Now they have several terabits of trunk bandwidth to 5 or more transit providers, and another few terabits into a nation wide academic network. The Chem building had 100Gb of reserved bandwidth on the trunk last I knew. Bandwidth is so freaking cheap. On top of their massive trunk, they also peer with local ISPs, several regional IXs, and even have on site Netflix and other CDNs.

      As for low latency gaming. I get 6-8ms from my home to game servers 200+ miles away on my $40/m 150Mb symmetrical dedicated fiber directly to the CO. Times sure have changed.

  7. Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The internet use to be voluntary interconnection of private business and educational circuits. The internet was free.

    They killed it long ago when ISPs roes and then consolidated in to the phone monopolies that we have today.

    1. Re:Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      The internet use to be voluntary interconnection of private business and educational circuits. The internet was free.

      This is false nostalgia. The Internet was never free. In its early days it was very expensive, and there were severe restrictions on who could connect and what sort of information could be transmitted.

      They killed it long ago when ISPs roes

      The ISPs dramatically reduced the cost, gave access to normal people, and obviated the NSF content restrictions.

    2. Re: Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by reanjr · · Score: 1

      Maybe during the Arpanet days, but since the web was introduced, ISP plans have generally hovered around the $10-40 range. Not all that expensive.

    3. Re: Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, $40/m as in "$40 on top of your connection fee of $50". Back in the days of dial-up, the connection fee was you paying a phone bill on top of the Internet service. Now days, it's the TV and phone you have to bundle to get that "$30" rate, otherwise you charge you $80. It's only been since I moved to an area with a private locally owned ISP that I've finally gotten true $40/m+tax bill for 100Mb symmetrical fiber internet for a non-intro price.

      And that's ignoring that random extra fees most ISPs like to charge. Charter's $30/m Internet left me with about a $100/m bill after 6 months. My current ISP's $40/m is costing me about $42 after 5 years and my bill as never gone up, only down.

    4. Re:Free Urban Internet Failed Decades Ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There used to be this downstream/upstream payment system. You paid upstream to get a connection from a university. People downstream paid you to give them a connection. In theory everyone would get rich this way. What actually happened, was that the universities didn't invest too much money in their USENET servers and ISDN lines were as reliable as "a wet piece of string". When those got clogged up due to heavy traffic, too bad, you'll just have to wait. We would actually end up missing notifications of talks because by the time the invitation made it through our local USENET connection, the talk had already happened days ago.

      ISP's cut out the middleman, and gave you a direct connection to the top-tier servers.

  8. Successful? Wasn't it cancelled? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Didn't they cancel further roll-out because all the kiosks were being used for porn?

  9. Internet access is not a "human right" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By this logic, cars and airplanes and TVs and bank accounts are all human rights.

    Human rights are your right to your life, your liberty (to do what you wish provided you don't harm others), and your property (provided you didn't steal it, in which case it isn't really your property).

    Internet is a product, which requires labor, satellites, wires, electricity, and heavy infrastructure to provide. To say internet is a "right" for all necessarily implies you believe there is a "right" to compel other people to labor to provide it, which is slavery. Do you believe in slavery? Hopefully not.

    https://fee.org/articles/high-speed-broadband-is-not-a-human-right/

    1. Re:Internet access is not a "human right" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I said no more comments please! Your words are very upsetting!

    2. Re:Internet access is not a "human right" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Human right" might be the wrong term, but I can't even get a job at a farm without the Internet. Pretty much every job in or around the city has online only applications. Walmart does have kiosks that you can apply for a job. It's right next to the line of people waiting at the service desk. While you upload your resume and enter in your personal info like SS#, address, phone#, and stuff, you got a line of 10 people 3' behind you with no privacy guards. Just an open computer on an open desk, and the LCD screen has an amazing viewing angle while being a super low resolution to make those fonts really big for people who can't see well.

      Most stores don't have kiosks. You can go to the library, but then you have a 30min per day limit. Better fill out that online app quickly. No time for hunt-and-peck typing. Since you can't use USB, computers are locked down, you'll need to have your resume already in the cloud if you want to upload from the public computers. Either you need to type up your resume at the library during your daily 30min sessions, or you'll need access via some other method.

      And no one wants to call anyone any more. They'll send you an email or use social media to private message you to setup a time for an interview. If you don't have 24/7 access to the Internet, it might take you a week or longer of correspondences to setup a time with email tag. Anecdotally, my wife was messaged over Facebook that they had an interview slot open in the next hour, otherwise she'd have to wait 2 weeks.

      If you don't have internet access, you're pretty much screwed.

  10. YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYBODY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We all know what you mean with your coded dogwhistle words like "URBAN" and "FREE" and "RISE".

    RACIST NAZIS FUCK OFF!

  11. "Free" as in "Beer" by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1
    Or, if you prefer, "Free" as in "Lunch", as in "no such thing, as.."

    Monetization, monetization everywhere!

    ..of course, is anyone really finding this to be a revelation? xD

    1. Re:"Free" as in "Beer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your mom brings down beer for your lunch? Cool.

    2. Re:"Free" as in "Beer" by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      You're either mistaken or English isn't your primary language and you're confused; it's your mom that brings me beer for my lunch. xD

    3. Re:"Free" as in "Beer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or private...

  12. LinkNYC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    has a free Internet yes thats true but on a side note they also forgot to put a sticker on them informing public that there are at lest 3 video cameras on those LinkNYC boxes watching everything, just wonder who also uses those video feeds...

  13. Except it's not by DaMattster · · Score: 1

    Your data is being harvested and sold so you've got no expectation of any kind of privacy. There is nothing free or altruistic about these urban internet offerings.

  14. is this public good... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    good enough for pr0nhub et al?

  15. Not here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I live in a small town of roughly 10K people. There's not much around here. Uber? Nope. Amazon same-day delivery? Nope. Shared bicycles? Nope.

    On the other hand, I work from home and my rent is below CAD$500 for a 825 square feet, 5-1/2 rooms apartment.

    1. Re: Not here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      800 square feet isn't shit. I have one room in my house that's that big. And my rents only $1000 per month.

      5 1/2 rooms? Must be small 150 square feet rooms each room. One person living.

  16. Free as in free beer, not as in free speech! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We want it libre!

  17. LinkNYC by fafalone · · Score: 1

    You mean the new homeless porn access program? Now that's service, bringing porn right to them in the middle of the street.

  18. Re:Successful? Wasn't it cancelled? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I recall how nobody was able to access the free Internet kiosks because all of the free terminals were occupied by (homeless) men using them to watch porn in public.

  19. We can go back to text emails by drnb · · Score: 1

    Ever try using Tor? Now multiply the slowness that is Tor times 1,000. You'd be lucky to get 300 baud.

    Good, we can go back to text emails. That would solve a few problems.

  20. "Don't know much about geography..." by westlake · · Score: 1

    Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?

    Toronto is north of here over about 30 miles of open water. The Niagara escarpment to the south makes bridging to the backbone near Buffalo something of a problem. Building out a network of any size is difficult and and MESH isn't magic.

  21. so, title II by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so, title II.