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Wardriving is the strange (and somewhat unfortunate) name for driving around with an 802.11x wi-fi equipped notebook computer looking for open access points. In a place like Manhattan they are everywhere. If you find one, you might want to engage in a little on the spot documentation with a graffiti language created to tip off fellow searchers: warchalking.
But why limit yourself to just wi-fi? The air is full of all kinds of signals. Check out these do it yourself plans for remotely monitoring wireless video cameras: warspying.
I'm working on a full report of the new apple music service, as well as iTunes 4.
This afternoon I've been trying to get iTunes to share music over the net. This is the cool new ability in iTunes 4. Apple calls it rendezvous, but that is just the apple branding of the open source project zero conf. This aims at establishing networks of computers with zero configuration. In other words, if networks are possible (over ethernet or over wi-fi or whatever) they will just be established automagically. No fussing with IP addresses or any other networking arcana.
And it actually works. Or pretty much. Machines running iTunes 4 on our office ethernet indeed connect to each other, and music on any one computer shows up as a seperate play list in the iTunes jukebox on every other computer. So I can play music off any other machine in the office, and anyone can play music off my machine. Very slick.
But I should also be able to do this over the internet! That is the real amazing thing. But I could only sort of get that to work. iTunes can see my dial up machine from the office over the internet, but I can't see the office from my dial up machine. No doubt this has to do with the router and switch my office machine is sitting behind. So the afternoon was filled with lots of reading about router configuration and port forwarding. But so far to no avail. I'll try some more tomorrow.
Rough transcript of the Chandler presentation at ETCon. This is the most information I've seen yet on Chandler.
There is a satellite broadcast of today's Apple event (1pm eastern time) but no webcast. Or at least none was announced. But someone said this might be it. It loads for me, but there is no content there at the moment. Maybe at 1:00.
Went to Barramundi for R.'s birthday yesterday which doubled as their annual garden opening event. Now it really feels like summer. Also, from the additional confirmation department, this morning I bought a mango. Life is sweet.
My t-mobile sidekick (danger hiptop) email service has gotten much worse lately. I used to get emails immediately. Like within a few seconds of their being sent. Now it sometimes takes an hour!
An hour!
This will not do.
So we're thinking about putting free Wi-Fi at the cafe. Anybody have any experiences to share? I'm under the impression that it is against the terms of service to share a Verizon DSL line (not sure how they'd ever know though.) Unfortunately it is impossible to find the real fine print on their site (well, OK, maybe it's not impossible, but I couldn't do it.)
I've looked at bway.net a bit, as I've always heard good things about them. They seem to be of the "it's your bandwidth, do what you want with it" school of thinking which is obviously what I'm looking for. Any experiences with them? How about speakeasy?
And finally, does it even make sense to sign a one year contract with a little guy like bway? (or speakeasy?) I mean taking into account possible legislation which would remove the onus presently on the big Telco's to share their lines with these guys. I've fallen a bit out of touch and no longer know where that legal stuff stands.
Help appreciated. If not, I'll update below as I find answers myself. Pretty fun project.
Big Apple announcement on Monday (well, maybe it won't be big.) Probably new iPods, and most likely the introduction of an Apple music download service. Those rumors about Apple buying Universal Music Group seem to have died down.
I'm worried about this download service. I'm scared they will price it too high (and put in too much DRM) for it to work. Apple can't take too big a failure at the point in time.
What would you people pay to download music? I mean legally. How much per song? How much per album?
Good legal news for file sharing networks:
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."