Slashdot Mirror
Internet Payphones launched
Stephen writes "BT has opened the first payphone with internet access. It's expensive, however, at 10p (16c) per minute. Read all about it at the BBC. " Here's my question: The phone books always get destroyed, the booths managled-how long is it going to take for for hoodlums to destroy these things?
Funny thing with those dutch Internet kiosks was that some websites could crash the browser it used (www.digicrime.com had a section to kill various browsers).
:-(
With the browserapplication killed you got an all too familiar desktop... yep, the damn thing ran ms-windows and guess what? MSIE was also installed... funny. After crashing the browser wich checked your phonecard you could go on for free with MSIE or download another browser which didn't do anything with the phonecard at all.
The dutch telecom company was kind enough to put one of those thingies at the campsite of the Hacking In Progres conference.
The great idea was to make a "backup" of the harddisk onto one of the many computers on HIP (each with quite anonymous IP numbers) just to see what was on it and maybe even installing Linux on the kiosk.
We had it all planned...
Imagine the surprise of those dutch PTT engineers when they would have found out their kiosk suddenly ran an entirely different operating system!
Unfortunately someone else got a bit impatient and crashed the thing real good before we got a chance to implement our Evil Plans... It wouldn't boot anymore, so playtime was over.
Too bad, it didn't seem too complicated to have it run Linux and figure out a way to make the chipcardreader/writer work.
I'm not sure if I'll ever trust those public Internet Kiosks with passwords... A few years ago they were just a bit too public! Maybe security is tightened a bit, but then again, I guess I'm just paranoid...
But still, I like the idea of being able to read slashdot at any moment, even in the pouring rain on the street!
The article says, "no matter how hard you hit the screen with the phone receiver in frustration, it will not break". Of course, that's something that has to be tried, isn't it?