Archive for the Social category
Inveneo has a great case study about setting up long-distance Wifi in earthquake hit Haiti, which in short boils down to:
1. Wifi Network Design: make sure your nodes are visible to each other and pointing at the right location
2. Location Capacity Survey: confirming the location can support a network node
3. Wifi Hub Antenna Pointing: aiming the dish for the highest signal strength
4. Installation Trip Preparation: determining what you’ll need before your 30ft up a tower
5. Node Antenna Setup: aiming and connecting the antenna
6. Disseminating Internet Access: networking locally for end-user access
7. Network Management: making sure everyone has equal access to bandwidth
Inveneo helps out NetHope rebuilding Haiti’s shattered communications infrastructure using open source solutions like OpenNMS and OpenStreetMap.
Tonight’s free Wifi at Sydney Twestival (at 19:30, Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford St, Paddington, NSW 2021) is brought to you by Unwired’s uConnect.
“Twestival participants can bring their laptop or mobile devices and continue to tweet through the night on the Unwired wireless connection.”
Enjoy, I’d say!
Chris Duran has set up a free wifi mapping project, just what we have been waiting for (and I was too lazy to do myself):
WiFi in Australia is a “user-generated and user-moderated maps of WiFi hotspots all over Australia”.
Any one can add any wifi (open, paid, restricted) they encounter, so start contributing!
Anna from Woollahra Council Library lets us know about…
“more Sydney wifi – now at the Paddington and Double Bay branches of Woollahra Council Library in eastern Sydney. At Double Bay, the network reaches through most of the surrounding gardens too – it’s a beautiful spot and lots of things to help with concentration and/or procrastination! Our provider is uConnect, so the terms of service are the same as the City of Sydney’s wifi.”
So next time, go procrastinate at:
- Paddington Library – Paddington Town Hall, 247 Oxford St (cnr Oatley Rd)
- Double Bay Library – 536 New South Head Rd, Double Bay (near Redleaf Pool)
Thanks Anna!
The Times Of India writes about the Mumbai police looking out for unsecured Wifi connections:
City policemen will be soon seen roaming in the streets with laptops
in their hands in search of unsecured Wi-Fi connections, in the backdrop of terror mails sent before blasts and terror attacks.
Owners will get notices from the police when their access point is “not password protected or secured”. How do they define “secured”? Will the owner get a notice when he uses WEP over WPA? Will they check for default and weak passwords?
So, because they send emails over open Wifi access points before the attacks, something they could have done with a wireless (broadband) modem or mobile phone, all Wifi needs to be closed up?
iiNet has teamed up with Starbucks to provide WiFi services to 20 Starbucks stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Check out the full list of stores, for Sydney it’s Hyde Park, Cockle Bay, Haymarket, Circular Quay, 525 George Street, Transport House and QVB. As an iiNet customer, you’ll receive 100Mb of free data to use per month in Starbucks WiFi hotspots. Keep your iiNet username and password handy.
McDonald’s has been offering $14/h Telstra WiFi with their burgers since 2003, allowing customers to work online (yeah right) or surf the Web while munching on their $6 burger and fries. Did anyone actually do that? Because, well, I know myself, and eating a greasy burger with sauce and greasy fries,… But at least they were ahead of their times compared to their competitors.
“There is a McDonald’s restaurant in virtually every community and by making this service available to so many we are taking a leadership position and anticipating the future communication needs our customers.”
Now they take the next big leap, and offer free WiFi at all their locations. That’s at 720 McDonald’s stores across Australia (roll-out over time). And at the same time they’ll make it ‘Family Friendly’ by using Clean Pipes technology from earthwave:
“Clean Pipes provides a common security framework to protect McDonald’s from both external and internal threats. The solution involved a multi-million dollar investment by earthwave to develop a defense in depth security architecture made up of layers of security including firewalls, network intrusion prevention systems, distributed denial of service protection and various web protection mechanisms. This architectural approach will enable McDonald’s ability to continually monitor and defend its networks against potential internet related attacks.”
“The ‘Clean Pipes’ service also provides McDonald’s with a number of proactive measures and reporting aimed at both highlighting and countering potential network security threats from internet traffic generated by customers using the McDonald’s free WiFi Hotspots.”
Sure sounds impressive, using all the security buzzwords. Why would you need all that to offer ‘Family Friendly’ free WiFi? As far as I can tell, that means their public WiFi is linked to their internal network?
Next, they’ll get bouncers at the door too…
Better be safe than sorry, I guess.
Wednesday, Oct 15th, 2008
Categories: Social
Poverty manifests itself through different guises. When we think of poverty, we’d immediately recall a homeless person or a malnourished African child, a reflection of economical poverty. Social poverty is the result of lack of social capital. As per J.D. Lewandowski, “the concept of social capital refers to the networks of social trust and social connections that serve to enable individual and collective actions in a given social structure or society.” Social exclusion is often a cause of poverty, conflict and insecurity. Improving social inclusion increases one’s well-being, mentally as well as economically.
The Internet has enabled a way of social interaction and connections which facilitate the kinds of action that “make democracy work” (Robert Putnam). It enables freedom of movement up and down the socio-economic and cultural ladder through social participation and human development. It offers economic opportunities and access to public and social services.
On the Internet, everyone can be anyone, and social division becomes a non-issue (though actually new social divisions are constantly being created, on a different level – are you on MySpace or Facebook?). In fact, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (Peter Steiner’s cartoon). Another joke goes “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Internet and he won’t bother you for weeks.” But that man might rise up to be the next Internet millionaire. Access to the Internet is an instrumental right for the improvement of people’s capability. Missing out restrains personal growth. That’s also why gouvernments provide libraries, and Internet access at libraries. It gives people access to knowledge, but libraries are a less than ideal environment for social interaction. Bringing the Internet closer to the community, closer to home, empowers people to take control of their own social network (online and offline). That’s where Free Sydney Wireless (Free Australia Wireless) fits in. By providing free Internet access, through a shared connection, we try to bridge the social divide in our own community, closest to us. This hardly costs us anything extra, as we already pay for Internet access. This is our small contribution to tackle social poverty.
The growth of social networking and user generated content reflects the deep rooted need of people for self expression, social interaction and peer validation. People sharing without personal financial gain. As they do, others do. Or so we hope anyway.
What are you waiting for, why not get involved?
Reposted from halans.com.
Almost twenty years on, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, creates the World Wide Web Foundation, the Web as humanity connected by technology:
The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.
The mission of the Foundation is:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
In a world where Net neutrality is under threat, and the intertubes are being censored, this is a welcome initiative. I believe Free Australia Wireless fits perfectly in the Web Foundation’s “Web for Society” and “Friends of the Web” programs.
Read the Web Foundation’s concept paper.
Meraki posted some interesting metric tidbits on its product blog last week:
In the course of building Free the Net in San Francisco, we came across some compelling metrics. Since its birth about a year ago, nearly 150,000 wireless devices have used the network. The percentage of those devices made up by iPhones has grown from 6% to 20% in just the past five months.
San Francisco, or California for that matter, isn’t indicative for iPhone usage around the world (with Apple and Silicon Valley around the corner). But it is an obvious trend that more and more devices have integrated Wifi, mobile broadband is still too slow and too expensive, and people want to connect, preferably free. Free, ubiquitous wireless internet, municipal or community driven, offers opportunity for social interaction, information gathering and innovative services we don’t know of yet. The iPhone hype, and any other Bold move by Blackberry, may well be the driving force for more free wireless Internet (one can hope and dream), even in Sydney.
Meraki will be developing a separate iPhone splash screen which Meraki users will be able to set up and customize soon.