While I’m on the subject I should mention http://www.publicip.net/ as well. They have a downloadable Linux CD that you can burn and turn any PC into a manged hot spot for a coffee shop or other small business. Since it is all based on a bootable CD with config files on a floppy disk it is never in danger of loosing it’s setting and rebooting is the extent of the maintenance.
Just another great open source project trying to make the work a better place with WiFi 
I swear I’ll tie this into [[AntiSpam:anti-spam]] stuff at some point, but this one was just way too cool for me to not talk about.
As you start reading through these blogs and as I get more of them out there you will start to realize I’m a big proponent of toppling the status quo in favor of new and more balance systems. I love [[OpenSource:open source]] and I plan on starting some big projects, as I manage to free my time up I think that the only real way to get innovation is to allow people to freely express themselves and resolve this own problems by building on the work of others.
The Internet has provided many opportunities for people to do this and here is another one
A friend of mine sent me this article and I’m planning on checking this own by purchasing some hardware and seeing how large of a project I can put together in my general area.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040527.html
The basic idea comes down to letting people with good ideas do what they want with the tools and processes that others have already created. In this instance the Linksys WRT54G wireless DSL router has been modified by the great people over at http://sveasoft.com/ to make it the most powerful wireless gateway that I am currently aware of.
From the reading I have done on the http://sveasoft.com/ website and the article above it would be possible to have a small web of these routers and only 16% of them need to be connected to the Internet the others simply hop wirelessly up to 3 hops to one of the routers that is connected to the Internet.
This would allow hotels to offer wireless services with only one connection per floor and a few $70 routers on each floor to cover the rooms. Or an entire shopping mall to have WiFi and only one $40 a month [[DigitalSubscriberLine:DSL]] line, no other wiring needed!
This changes the economics of Internet access, again. With the ability of these [[InternetRouter:routers]] to limit bandwidth that is used a company could set up a [[InternetRouter:router]] to have 384Kb for anyone and then the rest of their [[BandWidth:bandwidth]] can be used by their own staff.
I know that I only use about 20% of my 1.5Mb T1 line. So I have it in my plans to setup one of these routers with a high gain antenna and limit the [[BandWidth:bandwidth]] to 384Kb. It’s bandwidth I’m not using and if the device is placed right it will allow others to use my unused [[BandWidth:bandwidth]] to get out to the net for free. I’m paying for it and it is not being used, so I’d be happy to have it used.
Now for the [[AntiSpam:anti-spam]] tie in This concept can potentially add to the anonymity for [[EmailSpammer:spammers]]. Imagine trying to track a [[EmailSpammer:spammer]] down who is using a laptop and is three wireless hops away from some home users DSL line to send out 1,000,000 spam messages. I haven’t come up with a solution that solve this except perhaps permission based use of ports. By that I mean the need to have a user-name and password to be able to send or receive on certain ports, like port 25 and port 587 which are the two most used ports for [[SimpleMailTransferProtocol:smtp]] [[EmailMessage:email]].
But I’m sure they’d find a way around that or an open network to send from anyway …. That was kind of cynical, wasn’t it