Open Wi-Fi hotspots: Dens of iniquity!

At least that's the assessment of Iowa's top cybercop, according to this story from a Quad Cities TV station.  (For the geographically challenged, the Quad Cities are four adjacent municipalities straddling the Mississippi River just below where Interstate 80 crosses; they are Davenport and Bettendorf on the Iowa side, across from Rock Island and Moline in Illinois.  East Moline, the site of the incident detailed in the story, is an Illinois suburb of its larger partial namesake.)

So...where have we heard about anything like this before?  Here, maybe?  Well, at least this time the affected library isn't wasting any time in (I hope) cutting off access to the peer-to-peer filesharing networks that were almost certainly implicated in this event.  Too bad that the P2P community hasn't taken heed of the warnings in my post about the previous incident.  Stay on that path, ladies and gentlemen, and you will only further marginalize yourselves-to your own detriment. 

And finally-thirteen hundred bucks for a solution?  Seems kind of steep to me.  Maybe they should have dropped in at the local community college to see if an IT student would have taken on the project for a nominal salary-or just for the experience.  For that matter, a student the library brought on as seasonal help or as an intern might have sufficed.  After all, it is summer.

That's one way to keep them out of the landfill, I guess.

ABC News:  New York City phone booths to become Wi-Fi hotspots.

You've got to wonder, though, how many people will be willing to sit-especially after dark- in a town like New York with a laptop, tablet or smartphone out in an area where criminals will know they'll be-and with what.

That said, it'll be interesting to see how it works out.  If anyone from around here is going to NYC anytime soon, a first-hand report would be appreciated.

Oh, and if you happen to be in or around one of those booths when a nerdy, bespectacled, newspaper-reporter-looking fellow dashes in and begins pulling off his jacket, do a good turn for truth, justice and the American Way and kindly step aside-because someone, somewhere is in big trouble.