July 25, 2002
Wireless+glyph=?

warchalksmall.gifSome of you may wonder about my dual obsessions with wireless internet and Maya glyphs. Pretty simple to me - gotta pay for my trips to the jungle with long months on the computer. Also, after achieving my sci-fi dream of doing a satellite uplink from atop a Maya pyramid, beaming the web to the New York monoliths holds a strange attraction. This weblog lets me indulge both halves of my brain.

Another nice intersection of the two is the phenomenon of warchalking. This may be old news to some folks (the last 2 weeks, in the NY Times already, Doonesbury has hit a precursor, "wardriving") but some clever nerds have devised a variation on the old hobo runes which marked the location of a handout. These new symbols are designed to mark wireless network access in the area that is open for exploiting.

I'm dealing with issues of how to create an open network that can also be managed. Bandwidth to the people, but let's make sure that one warchalker doesn't come by and suck up all the bandwidth at once. It's the age-old dilemma of the commons - how to share the resource without taking more than your share.

Posted by Dave at July 25, 2002 03:47 PM