"Hitler did nothing wrong"

Worst. Wi-fi network name. Ever.

That is a screen capture I made of my iPad this past Friday when I was at Mysticon at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood in Roanoke.  The hotel itself deserves bigtime props for opening up its own wi-fi network to all of the convention goers.  That's what I was doing when I was inside my iPad's network settings and saw... that.  We were waiting for the Peter Davison panel to begin in one of the hotel's ballrooms.  I haven't even made the image a JPG as usual: that's the original PNG file.  All I did was change the file name.

I know wi-fi SSID names need to be unique but c'mon: that is beyond the tasteless.

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MPAA shuts down town's entire Wi-Fi over one download

Coshocton, Ohio is a town without free Internet. Thank the Motion Picture Association of America, which successfully turned off Coshocton's Wi-Fi connection to the world because, allegedly, one person used the wireless access to download a copyrighted movie.

In addition to being of great benefit to out-of-town tourists and business people, the Coshocton County Sheriff's Department personnel have found the Wi-Fi service to be a tremendous convenience by letting then file an accident or incident report without having to leave their vehicles. That's no more, because the MPAA somehow mustered up enough power to violate the Geneva Convention and subject everyone in town to collective punishment.

(Just one more reason why the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs to be mutilated beyond all possible recognition.)

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Claudville, Virginia gets first public white-space network

The town of Claudville in Patrick County, Virginia - a place where I have lots of ancestral roots - is the launching site of the much-awaited white-space network technology! Described as "Wi-Fi on steroids", white-space allows for much more bandwidth over larger areas. A bunch of it just got freed-up from switchover to digital television transmission earlier this year (what, you didn't think that all that spectrum was just gonna go to waste, didja?). This first network comes as a result of collaboration between Microsoft, Dell and Spectrum Bridge.

Okay well what I wanna know is: does the Wal-Mart in Patrick Springs carry white-space routers already??

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Wireless networking hacked to see through walls! (BUT...)

Okay, first the bad news: researchers have found a way to modify wireless networking signal processing so that people outside your home or office can "see" what you are doing right through the building's walls.

But there is also good news: another group of researchers has developed a new kind of paint that blocks wireless networking radio waves! Just coat those same walls with this stuff, and if the paint lives up to its promise you'll be free to do... whatever (and I don't wanna know either).

I could also see a huge market for this paint among those worried about mind control rays...

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