argh. First post this morning got eaten. I hate software.
What I was ranting about:
Awesome to see that Tim announced the Summit. The announcement is pretty late, because we couldn’t get the site we wanted, but the new location is pretty awesome. My personal helping-out task this morning is to go test their guest wireless access, aka ‘make sure ssh and irc ports aren’t blocked.’ We haven’t formalized any couch-sharing arrangements (we’ll probably just wiki-fy it) but my two futons are pretty much first-come first-served :) Slight priority for Aussies. Hope lots of people can drive up for the weekend.
After my post last night about open wireless, Ingo Lütkebohle emailed me to tell me about nocat.net, which is a registration project for open wireless. The basic idea, as Ingo presented it, is pretty solid. The two big things: if you leave an open network, you’re probably in many places legally liable for things that pass through your network, since there is no way to prove it wasn’t you that did $BAD_THING. nocat CYAs here, since you can match a service registration to the $BAD_THING. The second thing is that you announce you’re providing a neighborly service- to a user, you’re not some idiot who left their AP open, but someone conscientiously contributing to open access for others. I really like this publicity aspect- it’s something RMS (correctly) rants about all the time in regards to free software, and it applies to free networks as well. We can’t let people take either for granted.
Update: I’m writing this from the open balcony of the Stata Center, which apparently has its own, open, wireless net distinct from MIT’s. I couldn’t get on to MIT’s, which is a little scary, but whatever. It’s mad cool up here :)