Well, there's iniquity...

...and then there's absolute scumbaggery such as that perpetrated by this guy from Oregon.

Memo to similarly inclined scumbags:  Stay away from open Wi-Fi.  Why, you ask?  Well, for the same reason you should stay away from open windows.  Anything you're seen doing through either by law enforcement doesn't require a search warrant in order to be used against you in court. 

Better yet, get the help you need so that you won't have to hide behind curtains or encryption-and society won't have to hide its most vulnerable from you anymore.

Oh, and to the aforementioned scumbag of the first part:  Enjoy your stay.

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.

The king's X

Well, so much for the idyllic dream of the preceding post.

It ain't gonna happen.

Here's hoping, however, that the Rosedale activists don't give up and follow though on trying to do what they can with what's available now.  Sure, a megabit is only a thousandth as much as a gigabit, but it's still a megabit more than nothing. 

And speaking of nothing...it's been nearly 15 months since the Big Announcement.  Did I miss my invitation to the initial public demonstration?  Oh, it hasn't happened yet.

Hmmm...curious.  And I think more and more people are beginning to share that opinion. 

Seems like there's just no getting away from it.

The more we try not talking here anymore about the coming of Google Fiber (the official name of the project now) to the metro, the more reason someone else gives us to.  Well, blame the Kansas City Star for this one. 

An intriguing proposal, to say the least-and one that looks as if it really could go a long way toward moving eastern Wyandotte County in the right direction.  All the more incentive for someone, somewhere, to begin cracking the whip and getting at least some of that fiber hung and lit.  You know, Rosedale wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Ho hum...

Kansas City Star:  Don't get ready to sign up for Google Gigabit just yet.

Gee, do you think maybe they should have taken on something a bit simpler instead-like a cure for the common cold, perhaps?

And while we're on the subject of those who still just don't get it...

Not wanting to waste a whole Friday evening after the KCK library stop proved fruitless, I decided to continue westward, giving myself a chance to keep an eye peeled for potential new locations along State Avenue (didn't see any) and eventually, of course, to check out how things were going out around the Speedway these days.  Not so well, I'm sorry to report.  The onetime open-air network that served the Legends shopping center is now gone-thanks, ath64, for updating the guide page to reflect this-and the Yard House Restaurant has now thrown up some sort of crazy clickthrough page on its network that I couldn't get to work without enabling more than I'm comfortable starting a browser with.  Jazz:  A Louisiana Kitchen apparently also now offers what may be free and open Wi-Fi but their clickthrough page didn't work any better. 

Finally, Books-a-Million (which has taken to calling itself just "BAM!") apparently is still dead set on following its onetime competitor Borders into oblivion by being even more obstinate when it comes to moving away from fee and towards free.  They still expect anyone who isn't a member of their discount club to pay for access. 

Since this company is obviously run by people who just woke up after being in a coma for the past couple of years, or maybe have recently returned from an Antartctic expedition or something like that, here's a brief refresher.  Barnes and Noble went to free and open with its Wi-Fi while Borders stayed play-for-pay until competitive pressures forced them to follow B&N's lead.  The upshot:  B&N is still around.  Borders isn't.

Oh, and to bring you totally up to speed-Will and Kate really went through with it, Casey Anthony walked and Francisco Franco is still dead.