This is a twisted tale with a happy ending although including mild indigestion at stops along the way at a fast-food emporium in Ayrshire Scotland, and scary-weird encounters on a park bench in Nantucket USA.
This tale has cameos involving most major fast-food chains, big hotel franchises, an impressive portfolio of airports and probably a bordello in Amsterdam, though my researches conducted on behalf of this column do have some limits. The law, like radio waves in our modern world, is ever present.
With the generation of this screed, your esteemed editor has now heard it all. In the decade plus during which I have been waxing lyrical about IT matters on this page, he has never before had the late arrival of my monthly wordage attributed to Ronald McDonald
and his minions! (No. But the one about your Russian wolfhound eating your neighbour’s poodle remains the best excuse for late delivery I’ve ever heard. Ed)
My failure to extract any form of technical support from that familiar chappie with the yellow boilersuit and big floppy red shoes (not even a glossy leaflet!) was no more successful than getting a few good Wi-Fi pointers from BT Openzone’s teleservice centre out of hours. For a chance to pay 30 cents (or 20p) a minute for the pleasure of watching the little green winky light flash on your network card, you’d have expected more from the Big Corporate Network—though the level of cluelessness exhibited by the burger pushers at the sales counter wasn’t a major disappointment. It was a case of ask not, get not. You don’t get tech support with your Egg McMuffin.
Hot spots abound
The world is, in theory, bursting with places where an itinerant computer-toting person can get a quick connection (and file some long overdue copy while on holiday) thanks to a bit of wireless networking technology called 802.11b that allows connection to a compliant network at 11Mbit/s—or so I’d hoped.
Although the IEEE is made up of a great bunch of guys, marketing has never been its forte. Sure enough, some fellows in sharp suits came along and renamed 802.11b for the benefit of the masses as ‘Wi-Fi’. More snazzy dressers and fast thinkers figured that there could be a buck (or euro) or two in converting Wi-Fi into a public resource. According to JiWire (www.jiwire.com), who should know, there are 36,329 so called hotspots in the world where you can connect to the Internet without plugging in. Doubtless more are piling in every day. Some even offer the faster 54Mbit/s 802.11g variant.
In all there are more than 72 hotspots in Ireland, from the AirWireless office in Portadown to the Westbury Hotel on Grafton Street, Dublin. Various mobile operators provide most of the surfing sans wires for a reasonable fee. The capital accounts for over half of the count which is pretty good going in a largely rural patch of green floating in the Irish Sea. However, if you are an Internet free spirit and want to skip the swingeing charges imposed by most commercial Wi-Fi operators, there are but 11 free hot spots to chose from, of which only about half are outside Dublin.
Contrast this with the 411 hotspots to be found in the Netherlands (where some hotspots are hotter than others) or the 14 to be found in Poland and you get a view of where we sit in the unwired spectrum. As ever, when you need a hotspot in any place to which you are likely to travel, you might as well be on the back side of the moon—or in the lovely Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland on the Firth of Clyde. Same difference. Scotland has castles aplenty, aquatic cages full to the brim with soon-to-be-smoked salmon and clouds of
microscopic vampires that hunt at dusk but not a lot of useful Wi-Fi resource out in the boonies.
These words eventually disappeared into the ether courtesy of my home Wi-Fi network. And as the world builds out its Wi-Fi infrastructure, I hope I’ll be able to steal a few days away from my desk without connection anxiety. But dark forces are gathering. As ever, it happens in the US first and no doubt, with a little mediation from the Brussels bureaucrats, some aberrant version of the following disturbing story will happen in our bailiwick soon enough.
The names have been omitted to protect the innocent or the guilty, I can’t figure out which!
Park bench capers
A priest (seriously) was recently accosted while sitting on a park bench outside the Nantucket, Massachusetts Athenaeum, enjoying the mild temperature and the Wi-Fi signal. The copper said, ‘Sir, you can’t use the Internet outside the library.’ The man of the cloth, always ready with a snappy answer, asked incredulously: ‘What?’
The officer in question whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind his mirrored shades as one often is when carrying a Smith and Wesson, a nightstick and a radio, solemnly assured our man that in order to use the library’s open wireless signal, one had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station. No prizes for guessing that the library was shut at the time.
A respecter of authority and an ambassador for the church, the priest dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to his Airport card and, as he had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working offline on what turned out to be his first-person account of
this incident, later to be posted from a secure hiding place to a select Internet forum, bounced around certain elite mailing lists and thence into my hands (and now yours).
The techno-savvy priest had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and figured that he could post this perplexing and controversial moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle away to safety. As he was typing, the officer returned. In defence, the priest held up his notebook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that the Wi-Fi card was off.
‘Why don’t you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?’ suggested the guardian of park benches and global communications networks.
The good father closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. ‘I did notice several other open signals in the area. Am I allowed to connect to them?’
‘Maybe, if you had permission it would be all right, but it’s a new law, sir. “Theft of signal.” It would be like if you stole someone’s cable TV connection.’ There is no more dastardly deed than that, evidently, in need of policing in sunny parks.
My correspondent responded: ‘But this is a radio-signal thing—it’s not like a cable connection. It’s like someone has a porch light on and I’m sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I’m not stealing their light.’
‘It’s a law, sir. If someone comes along and downloads child porn and it goes through the access-point owner’s connection, that’s a violation and we’ve had cases of that. That’s a felony.’ The church is evidently about to take a lot of stick for unsavoury surfing on park benches in the US!
The priest wisely skipped the question of whether it’s less a problem if someone downloads porn, mp3s or bomb-making recipes while sitting in the library. Since he had already been categorised, however politely, with felons, discretion edged out valour. Can you imagine this happening in Belgium?
‘Is this a state law?’ he asked because, in the Land of the Free, there are many layers of legal protection designed to ensure that park benches and local libraries remain devoid of corruption.
The highest authority was cited! ‘It’s a federal law, sir; a Secret Service agent came and explained it to us.’
Diplomatically, the theologian probed: ‘Look, I don’t want to give you a hard time, and I’m very thankful that you alerted me to this, and I’ve done what you asked, but I’d be very surprised if there turned out to be a federal law forbidding my using an open wireless signal in a public place.’
‘Well, you can look it up, sir, and explain it to the chief.’ Obviously, Google’s legal sieve wasn’t available at the moment.
At this point, the priest and the copper shook hands and parted, the man in black dumbfounded that he had just been rousted for picking up an open wireless signal in public—and indeed for the mere act of using a laptop within a wireless hotspot’s range.
Not in my back yard
It was a shame that the priest wasn’t willing to become a martyr for this particular cause. This kind of state interference with God-given rights to connect to the Net must be exposed and stopped before ‘NO LAPTOP’ or ‘NO PDAS’ signs start appearing on the sides of buildings and in parks. Whether or not the federal law in question actually exists, it is evidently on the agenda of the enforcers. It happened in small town America. When will it happen here?
01/11/04
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers