the air here is free
So I'm at a cafe waiting for my car to be fixed, at the north east corner of Howard and 12th Street. The music here is free (actually, rebroadcasting of a radio station). The airconditioning here is free (ok, it's SF). The bathrooms are free (to customers). The electricity powering my laptop is free. The amazing mix of people coming in and out is free. And because of a network named "bitch", the IP is free too. Of course the coffee is not free, but because of all the rest, I've been sitting here for two hours, buying tons and tons if this drug.
They say the market is smart, so I'm hopeful about this wireless stuff. Here's another customer owned network, driving the cost of access down to zero.
Meanwhile, more on my whining about the wireless access at the WSIS conference: it turned out that even though the wireless access at WSIS was expensive and awful, the conference organizers were able to offer delegates free, perpetual monitoring of their every movement using the RFID built into the conference badges. How thoughtful of them. I guess WSIS was trying to teach the delegates what the future of the Information Society will be. It's just not the future either I, or the market, would select.
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Comments (8)
Just in case you conduct sensitive business via wireless... I thought that you'd want to know about megaproxy.com ... an anonymous surfing utility that makes sure everything sent to you from their servers is SSL encrypted (this is for browsing). Of course, this isn't end-to-end encryption like SSH or SFTP, but good enough to keep casual, local snoopers at bay.
Like this?
http://www.slimdevices.com/
I posted about this issue here:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/001691.html
Thanks for pointing to this. Very interesting issue and example of RFID abuse.
Are you sure the music is free? ASCAP and BMI are fairly aggressive about collecting licensing fees on music being played in commercial establishments. Free to you, perhaps, but the restaurant may be paying a relatively hefty licensing fee.
I wish I still had the link--I'll look for it--to a recent story about an SF bar that booked non-cover, original music bands only, and still had a licensing representative come in and claim he'd heard covers. The bar is now shutting down live music.
very sure about the music. One of the reasons the Sonny Bono Act was enacted in 1998, and not in 1995 (1976+19) was that it was heldup by the restaurant association. They demanded that small restaurants not have to pay anything for music. In 1995, that killed the bill. In 1998, it was made part of the bill. Sensenbrenner was the key proponent on behalf of the restaurant association.
of course, this was yet another totally outrageous part of the Bono Act.
Ah--worth knowing. My practical experience with this was late eighties/early nineties, in a bookstore where our boss drilled us on telling those who asked that the radio we played was just for our personal enjoyment. Apparently he'd still be vulnerable.
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