Category Archives: News

Wifi, Wifi, everywhere and not a drop to drink

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I really needed an Internet connection in a hurry Sunday night, I pulled over near the Williamsburg bridge in Manhattan, busted out the laptop, and got a list of about 25 Wifi access points. Just my luck every single AP had some form of security enable. In my extremely non scientific study this situation is more common then it was just 2 years ago.

I tried again later at Puck Fare a favorite bar and found that the open wireless networks I could connect to were restricted using a captive portal that allowed only 24Hour Gym members to access the Internet and in another case guests of the Puck Building across the street. So I should be happy that people are taking Wifi security seriously right?

Yes I am happy that home users and business are no longer leaving themselves wide open. But I am still pissed that there was copious amounts of wireless infrastructure that could have met my needs and that technology to provide it to me in a safe and secure way would cost almost nothing to enable.

The industry has done a lot to improve the quality of over the air data protection with the introduction of WPA and WPA2. And Wifi Protected Setup (WPS) has done wonders for easing the burden on end users to configure it properly. Now that it’s easy to be secure can we now put some focus on making it easy to share? Wi-Fi Alliance are you listening?

As usual Apple gets it. The Apple Airport Extreme among other cool features they have introduced something they call Guest Networking. In essence this allows you to create a 2nd secure or insecure wireless network with limited access to your network but full access to the Internet. So you primary wireless network is locked down and only you have the keys. But guests, neighbors within range, and guys pulled over in their cars desperately needing Internet access can share bit of your Internet connection.

NYCwireless public installation use a system we call SuperNode to manage fully public wireless networks. SuperNode is based on several open source projects and allows network sponsors to control access to the network, track usage, deals with abuse in easily managed. If you want to use this in home or office setup to provide guest access yourself check out our online instructions.

Lots of people will read this and be horrified at the thought of sharing their bandwidth with others. But the reality is you would be shocked at how little of the bandwidth you purchased you are actually using. In short there is plenty to go around. And good guest networking solutions allow you to cap how much of your bandwidth you can share with people like me. (Not sure if the Apple software allows bandwidth cap on guest users).

Truth be told there are still some risks that are not addressed well. The guest networking solutions out there are not perfect and more work needs to be done to prevent abuse of public wireless networks.

I never did find a usable wireless network that night and it’s shame the industry has not done enough to address this need. Is it in their economic interest to do so? Good question, smart companies like Apple seem to have figured out the answer. Linksys, Belkin, Dlink, Netgear and others you have some work to do.

Municipal Vaporware: Why NYC's Data Mine is A Data Dump

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This morning, Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled New York City’s long-awaited Big Apps contest. Big Apps seeks to promote the Internet industry in the Big Apple (it’s sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) and make local government more transparent.

I’ve been following the evolution of open data initiatives at the municipal level for about a year now, and was really hoping that New York was going to set the bar for future efforts across the country. It doesn’t. In fact it’s hard to understand why some notable local tech superstars like investors Fred Wilson and John Borthwick would sign on to such a lame effort.

First of all, the prize structure doesn’t make sense. First prize is $5,000 and dinner with Bloomie himself. No commitment to fund, adopt, promote or license the app for citywide use. People that build city apps want to engage the public and the investor community, not the city’s political elite. I bet they’d rather have dinner with Andrew Raisej.

Second, despite the fact that the project is primarily aimed at stimulating new business development (it’s coming from the econ dev folks) the rules require all entrants to grant the city a one-year license to distribute the app freely. So anyone thinking of building a paid iPhone app, you’re shit out of luck.

Finally, and most importantly, the NYC Data Mine that is supposed to be the raw materials for these apps, is more of an NYC Data Dump than anything else. Browsing through the 100+ datasets posted this afternoon to the city’s site, you see that about half are just boundary shapefiles easily downloaded or licensed through existing channels. The other half are a dog’s breakfast of static datasets (New! Updated monthly!) in every format from Excel to Access to (gag!) SAS. Hello, people, its 2009. API+XML FTW! Just to take one example, I can’t wait to see what fascinating mashups stem from the historic release of the Department of Consumer Affairs’ list of licensed electronic shops. Because what the world is really lacking is more information about the location of electronics retailers. What this Data Dump looks like is the collected attachments received in reponse to the poor bureaucrat who had to twist every department’s arms for one dataset, so the city could say every department contributed.

As someone who’s spent time brainstorming with government agencies about open data ecosystems, I’m saddened to see that the city has engineered this program for maximum political impact, minimal risk and mediocre innovation. It’s municipal vaporware.

p.s. Guys, you forgot to include the website URL in your press release.

p.p.s The one cool thing they did was used Challenge Post to host the site. Thanks BetaWorks!

Iphone, Google Latitude and a row boat

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Publishing your exact location regularly to everyone on the Internet? To some it sounds like a Orwellian nightmare. But this is exactly what Google Latitude allows you to do. Google can grab GPS location data from your mobile phone and it gives you the option of publishing your location at the city level or your exact GPS derived location (if your device supports location that is). You can share your location among a trusted group of friends or it offers you a snippet of code to link to a map you can integrate into a website or blog post. Not to mention it can update your Google Talk status with your location.

I can’t speak for other devices but on the Iphone there is no client required. The Safari web browser for the Iphone in version 3.0 supports the W3C Location API. So all you need to do is enroll your account and surf to http://www.google.com/latitude/. The Iphone OS will ask you if you wish to share your location, if you accept Latitude updates it’s database with your current location. That simple really. The Latitude interface will also show the location of any friends that have elected to share their location with you.

On Sunday I am participating in a fundraiser where I am going to row a 25 foot wooden boat around the island of Manhattan. (if you want to help support youth development in the South Bronx visit my pledge site http://rockingmanhattan.kintera.org/dustintodd). I thought it would be neat to use the Latitude public location badge functionality to show our progress through our 28 mile journey. Latitude offers an almost perfect solution for this. If you visit the Latitude public badge page you can enable the public badge feature (the default is disable.. wise choice) and offers a snippet of HTML code that allows you to include the map with your location displayed on any website or BLOG.

I have included the HTML in this post hopefully when you view this post the map will show my current location. Check back on Sunday the 4th to see us rowing around Manhattan.

NYCwireless @ Mashable Summer of Good Conference (#socialgood)

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We were very excited when the team at Mashable asked NYCwireless and Bway.net to bring free Wi-Fi to their Summer of Social Good Conference at the 92st Y. The event is going on today, and you can read more about it (and watch a Livestream of the speakers) at Mashable.com:

Today Mashable is hosting our first ever Social Good Conference, a one-day educational event celebrating the finale of the Summer of Social Good charitable campaign. The event is being held at the prestigious 92nd Street Y in New York City, but you don’t have to be in New York to watch or participate! Below we’ve embedded a live stream of the event so you can view presentations from well known and respected organizations and professionals as well as take part in discussions via chat.

We’ve got some serious bandwidth at the conference (2x ADSL 2+ internet connections) and some serious gear here (Cisco 1130 Lightweight Access Points, Soekris routers, and some new APs from Ubiquiti). If you are at the conference, let us know how the network is working for you. If you’re not, be sure to check out the Livestream.