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April 24, 2008

Wee-Fi: Big Brother Fi; Eugene (Ore.); Milpitas (Calif.); XP Net Monitor

By Glenn Fleishman

Artist’s project sweeps Wi-Fi into watching your neighbor: The Register reports on an art project in Brooklyn where Emery Martin heads a conceptual group that advocates volunteers to monitor open Wi-Fi networks to make terrorists aren’t planning attacks on “your own home network.” He provides technical details for connecting to and dumping all the traffic passing over open access points. It’s a send-up of the government’s warrantless monitoring of data communications, really.

My hometown of Eugene, Ore., expands Wi-Fi: The City of Eugene, where I lived during my formative teenage years, has expanded its free Wi-Fi access to five locations, including three pools and five community centers. It’s also available at airport, public library, local arts center, city hall, and elsewhere.

Milpitas votes to take over EarthLink’s network assets: The city will assume control of the assets, sell some equipment to raise replacement cost funds, and shut down public access, as previously expected. Their yearly costs for operation, most electricity, are estimated at $10,000 to $12,000 for the compact network.

Xirrus releases Windows XP version of monitoring widget: The free Yahoo widget shows current Wi-Fi area status in a kind of radar sweeping method, and provides a popup with full details about all nearby networks and their access points. The widget was previously release as a Vista gadget. (Gads, I can’t believe I just had to write that sentence. I suppose next, it will be a Windows Me gee-gaw, and then a Windows 98 jimcrack, and then, finally, a Windows 95 tchotchke.)

Posted by Glennf at April 24, 2008 1:54 PM

Categories: Wee-Fi

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