Kevin Sites Blog is coming from a CNN reporter on the front line in Iraq. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now So I'm surfing around, catching up on a day or two's news, and I come across some mega coverage of the SXSW conference via BoingBoing. I've read everything Bruce Sterling has ever done so this caught my eye. Then I noticed that the author and owner of the blog is one Heath Row, who just happens to be an Ecademy Power Networker!

If you got some serious time to spend on this, there's way too much content about way too many interesting topics from way too many interesting people. Great job, Heath. [from: JB Ecademy]

Yes, it's another episode of Get your war on

- Listen: They're called French Fries, they're greasy and they taste great with mayonnaise. F***ing dealt with it.

- Mayonnaise? Holy s***?, are you British? [from: JB Ecademy]

Is anyone going to the London WiFi Meetup tonight? If so, I may see you there.

Jerusalem, 33-34 Rathbone Place, London, 7pm [from: JB Wifi]

The inevitable counterpoint to World of Ends. EmptyBottle.org: World of Assholes

Essay question: Compare and contrast, World of Ends,

1. The Internet isn't complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing. It's an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
a. No one owns it
b. Everyone can use it
c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

with World of Assholes

1. The Internet is complicated
2. The Internet isn't a thing or an agreement : it's a place.
3. The Internet isn't stupid, but it's filled with stupidity.
4. Adding value to the Internet adds to its value.
5. Value on the internet goes unnoticed unless some high-traffic node connects it to the mainstream.
6. Money moves to the greedy.
7. The asshole of the world? Nah, the world of assholes.
8. The Internet’s three vices:
a. Americans dominate it
b. The wealthy populate it
c. More inhabitants does not automatically mean more value, except to those who want to sell you something
9. If the Internet is so complicated, why do so many seem driven to try and simplify it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already.

And apologies for the bad words. Heh, I'm only quoting here, ok! [from: JB Ecademy]

WiFi Ecademy DailEnews
Which led me to this.
Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log
Which led me to this.
Werblog
Which led me to this.
Japan Media Review -- A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society
Which led me to this.
Keitai Log

It's a smart mob world. [from: JB Wifi]

The Doc and David Weinberger have produced another great manifesto. World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. This should be required reading for any corporate type person with responsibility for "Internet Strategy".
[from: JB Ecademy]

Following my success in getting free wifi in a Starbucks in Faringdon road, I got this today.

Dear HotSpot user,

Yesterday marked the announcement of our plans to launch the UK HotSpot service. By the end of May, we will have an impressive 56 hotspots in Starbucks coffee shops across the UK.

This announcement follows the successful pilot programme in six Starbucks stores in London and Birmingham. Since the launch in August 2002, nearly 1000 of you have trialed the service.

These hotspot areas mean that you can relax with a coffee and, using a 'Wi-Fi' enabled laptop or PDA, can easily check your work e-mail, surf the internet or download multi-media presentations, without the hassle of a docking station or bulky cables.

This scheme has already worked incredibly well in the US, with over 2,000 HotSpots already in place. Discussion with airports and hotel chains means that the concept should be equally as successful in the UK, giving a real opportunity to showcase our service.

To ensure maximum flexibility and choice for all, from 31 March, four pre pay tariffs will be introduced, ranging from £5.50 for an hourly pass to £47.00 for a month pass.

More detail about the new T-Mobile HotSpot venues will be updated on www.t-mobile.co.uk/hotspot shortly.
Regards

Webmaster (JR)
T-Mobile UK

£5.50 for an hour is on the edge of what I'd consider acceptable. [from: JB Wifi]

The Register : Swisscom buys Megabeam and WLAN AG

Swiss telecoms operator Swisscom today announced the acquisition of WLAN hotspot firms Megabeam and WLAN AG. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

I hope Megabeam got a reasonable price. That's a pretty fast turn round for the VCs involved! [from: JB Wifi]

Here are some words as I try and type without making any typing errors. [from: JB Ecademy]

News - Wireless Internet startup to bring up to 30,000 "hot spots" to UK this year. Guy Kewney writes.

Next Monday, a thunderbolt will hit the British wireless Internet world, as Inspired Broadcast launches a "pubs and clubs" chain of WiFi hotspots in three thousand different locations, with the possibility of seeing this rise to 30,000 locations before the end of the year.
...

And what are we to make of this?

To the customer, these access points will almost certainly look like BT OpenZone, or Megabeam, or other big, commercial operations - and if you have an OpenZone account, you should be able to connect to these hotspots exactly as normal.

The full announcement is due next monday. [from: JB Wifi]

I'd like to see Google introduce a simple API so that my website (or Ecademy) could ping Google and say "I've changed. Please index me." I'd like to see this API be open, documented and implemented by all the other search engines and aggregators as well. In fact they could do worse than just copy the weblogs.com and blo.gs API. [from: JB Ecademy]

Has anyone succeeded in finding an alternate Windows client manager for Buffalo NICs like the LIIG and LIIGP? These cards are effectively cheap clones of the Orinoco cards but the client manager sucks.

There's been some talk over the years around netstumbler about using frigged Orinoco drivers with Buffalo kit to get netstumbler working. This is no longer necessary as the latest drivers and netstumbler release work fine together with one exception. Netstumbler doesn't seem to put the card into scan mode so you sometimes need to use the CM to do one scan, after which everything works. Anyway, when I tried messing with frigged drivers a while ago, I never persuaded the Orinoco CM to work. No matter what I tried, it always came back with some obscure Control panel .cpl error.

This issue came to a head for me yesterday. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in London with free WiFi. Netstumbler could see the AP, the CM gave me a series of confusing messages ending up with "no AP found". No matter what I did, the CM didn't show the AP in a list or appear to manage the DHCP process correctly. Meanwhile there's messages in the status bar saying 11Mbps, 85%. So I fired up a web browser to discover that the drivers had in fact found the network, got a DHCP address and associated. So in a nutshell, the CM just plain didn't do it's work. Now I can cope with this and hack my way round it, but it's not exactly consumer friendly.

This may or may not be relevant, but the Starbucks T-Mobile AP was a Cisco. I've previously had trouble finding and connecting to another set of Cisco kit in a public area, this time with WEP. In this case, the Buffalo code just plain couldn't see the AP at all.

Now I'm griping about one manufacturer's code. But reading between the lines here the whole industry is like this. Numerous point releases of drivers and apps that are all flaky to some degree or another. Not so very long ago, ethernet and dial up modems used to be like this. Graphics cards still are. It's about time some third party utility software appeared. So who's going to write the "Norton Utilities" Client Manager for common WiFi NICs? [from: JB Wifi]

Thoughtful and relatively complete analysis 2003 And Beyond It's relatively complete but with a pronounced Microsoft flavour. If you want an overview of the state of technology as of 2003 and particularly for SMEs, then read this. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm taking my own medicine and posting this from a public hotspot. It's the Starbucks in Farringdon road London. I haven't seen any promotional literature anywhere or any sign that they've got Internet access here. The signal at street level was pretty poor but downstairs in the basement, I'm getting full speed access.

When I first used the web, I got redirected to a TMobile page that asked for name and email address. After a 30 second wait, I've been enabled and am using the web with no problems. Email also seems to be working. DHCP gave me a 10.0.0.180 address with DNS on the DHCP server at 192.168.255.1 and a name of jblaptop.int.aptilo.com

My email is coming through with SSL (you should always do this on a public WLAN to avoid exposing passwords) so quite a lot of ports seem to be open. SSH and SFTP are also working.

The service is currently free so I guess that's it. It just worked. ZDNet are showing 4 sites in the city and one in Wardour st.
The Official site only shows 2 in the UK and not including this one.

A quick run of a speed tester shows

Downstream 928 Kbps (116.0 KB/sec) 1002 Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream 245 Kbps (30.6 KB/sec) 264 Kbps (inc. overheads)

Pretty damn good. [from: JB Wifi]

I'm looking for websites that cover the broadband industry (ADSL, Cable and fibre) in the UK and have a free RSS syndication feed. These might be magazines, community news sites, weblogs, free news aggregators or whatever. If there's no RSS feed they'll go in a list, but what I really want is the RSS.

Can anyone recommend any? [from: JB Ecademy]

There's a big conference going on about spectrum allocation in the USA. Weblogs covering it include: Scott Mace, Kevin Werbach, Cory Doctorow, Dan Gillmor, Lisa Rein, Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey, Smart Mobs.

Boing Boing has got some good coverage of several of the talks. Especially the discussions and presentations on community wireless. [from: JB Wifi]

Does anyone fancy doing a bit of mystery shopping of the various UK hotspot providers? All you need to do is this:-

- Visit a UK Hotspot, whether commercial, not for profit or free
- Try and use the service
- Write a short piece about your experience
- Ideally add a couple of photos of whatever promotional material you find at the site
- Post it as a blog on the Ecademy WiFi SIG. [from: JB Wifi]

Press Releases Details - NETGEAR : NETGEAR and Atheros to Deliver Dual-Band Tri-Mode 802.11a/b/g Wireless Networking Solutions

Is this the first A, B, G card and AP on the market? Scheduled ship date is March 2003. Note that there's no pricing in the press release. [from: JB Wifi]

Gguy Kewney's got details about the Harrogate seminar on mesh wireless. Locustworld are expecting to show their Meshbox in action. [from: JB Wifi]