Sifry’s Alerts

In what appears to be a direct threat to other cross-network roaming startups like Green Packet and Padcom, along with more established players like Ecutel IBM has announced the Everyplace Wireless Gateway, an extension to Websphere.  It is currently being used by the Toronto Police.

StarHub, in association with iPass and GRIC, has revealed its 180,000 square meter hotspot in Suntec City.  It looks like the business model will be a simple WISP model with roaming offered through iPASS and GRIC,  but Wong Ah Long, the CEO of Suntec City Development is looking at it as a springboard, stating that the 802.11 public network will serve as a ‘backbone’ for Suntec City to explore the integration of General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) and 3G technologies as well.

Linuxworld Expo San Francisco was this week, and I had the privilege to host a good friend and prolific alpha blogger, Doc Searls.  Even though he works his ass off for Linux Journal, we still had time late at night and in the early morning to shoot the shit, and talk about things ranging from the future of Linux, Internet Radio, entrepreneurship, and how totally lame the show floor was.  It is actually kind of wierd – Linux has practically achieved our half-heartedly joked goal of world domination, but rather than exciting, it’s actually kind of boring.  Kinda sad when the show floor is dominated by IBM, HPaq, AMD, and Intel, and no mid-sized companies, but hey, that’s how it goes when a technology leaves the pioneering stage.  Still, I miss the quirky fun startups and their booths, like the Ximian jungle booth. 




Anyway, Doc added to his enormous karma by writing up his experiences with projectdocs, an online document management tool that I wrote last winter.  The place was flooded with new visitors today – more today than in the entire month of August so far – and I hope some stay around and use the service, and give feedback.




Thanks, Doc!

Hey, I’ve got my new Golden Penguin Bowl award warming my mantle.  I actually can’t believe that my team won – we had Jeremy Allison on our team, and he never wins.




This is also the first post using my new and improved email-to-blog interface.  It now supports HTML in the email, so I can just use my favorite email client, Evolution to send in blog posts.

Cool, I’ve taken the well-designed mt-search package and added it to this blog, so now you have search capabilities, either on the upper right hand corner of each page, or a more advanced search available. This is all built in perl and integrates pretty nicely with Movable Type‘s core. Heck, it can even handle regular expressions for the geeky.

In Doc Searls’ blog on Wednesday, he asked me how I felt about using Wireless Access Reconnaissance as an acronym fill-in for all of the war- prefixes currently in vogue around WiFi, like Wardriving, Warchalking, Warwalking, Warbiking, etc., etc, etc.

Frankly, I don’t like the use of the prefix at all, and I encourage people to think of better words when describing the community usage ofwireless broadband access, because like it or not, these military analogies only server to heighten the “cracker, hacker, lawbreaker” image that has become associated with wireless community activists in many of the mainstream press.

I suppose if we’re going to put an acronym around the WAR prefix post-hoc, I’d rather use:

Wireless Activist Reality

Enjoy the meme.