Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 25 April 2003, 4:16 PM
Friday
Friday 25/04/2003
News that Westminster Council is going to submerge Soho in a sea of 802.11b is quite a wake-up call to those who think that 3G phones will be forever safe from wireless networking, because the coverage will never be there. If councils discover it's cheaper to abandon their existing communications and switch wholesale to wireless Ethernet that they provide themselves, then they'll start building out the infrastructure as fast as their little budgets can carry them. And, sure as 802.1x is 802.1x, they'll then start flogging public access to those networks -- we'll be back to the days when councils ran the local telephone service in no time. What fun!
But it also opens up some interesting playtime possibilities. As anyone who knows Soho will confirm, it's a place where lots of people do lots of things that are illegal, immoral and fattening. Westminster is thinking of using the network to do CCTV monitoring -- why not? -- so the prize to the hacker who first works out how to piggyback the connections will be an endless stream of reality TV. The same goes for all the voice-over-IP, data and control services Westminster is thinking of providing: they're going to be doing this in a neighbourhood full of bright young people with lots of high tech savvy and some evil ideas. It should all be most entertaining.
Click here to see more of Rupert's diaries.
News that Westminster Council is going to submerge Soho in a sea of 802.11b is quite a wake-up call to those who think that 3G phones will be forever safe from wireless networking, because the coverage will never be there. If councils discover it's cheaper to abandon their existing communications and switch wholesale to wireless Ethernet that they provide themselves, then they'll start building out the infrastructure as fast as their little budgets can carry them. And, sure as 802.1x is 802.1x, they'll then start flogging public access to those networks -- we'll be back to the days when councils ran the local telephone service in no time. What fun!
But it also opens up some interesting playtime possibilities. As anyone who knows Soho will confirm, it's a place where lots of people do lots of things that are illegal, immoral and fattening. Westminster is thinking of using the network to do CCTV monitoring -- why not? -- so the prize to the hacker who first works out how to piggyback the connections will be an endless stream of reality TV. The same goes for all the voice-over-IP, data and control services Westminster is thinking of providing: they're going to be doing this in a neighbourhood full of bright young people with lots of high tech savvy and some evil ideas. It should all be most entertaining.
Click here to see more of Rupert's diaries.
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