Irrepressible Invention
A few weeks ago, I commented on the way that homeless people could become a good source of information about wireless hotspots.Not long after that post,some wi-fi afficionadossat for a meal, and Matt Jones was struck with the idea of warchalking. It’s a clever term, since randomly searching for listening modem ports by dialing around was called “wardialing”. But warchalking combines this random search for hotspots with the homeless person’s concept of hobo signs. A good description, from freenetworks.org says that warchalking “uses hobo-rune inspired symbols to signify a nearby node. Chalk them on a nearby wall, pavement, or slow moving pedestrian, and passers-by in the know can connect at will.”
This raises some interesting bootstrap scenarios. One of the cool things that wireless technologies enable are location-based services. For example, when I am in Florida and use WAP on my GPRS phone to look forswimwear shops, it knows to list shops in the general area. I could see myself wanting to find the nearest hotspot so that I could get location information and reviews of the five nearest Pho places. But locating wireless hotspots is, itself, a location-based service. Once you are online,you can just use your connection to look up more hotspots online, and follow them like a trail of bread crumbs. So it is really only the first warchalk that you need. Maybe you could go to Starbucks, and pay for the service just long enough to get your Cappucino, and by then have found the location of the nearest free site. Maybe Starbucks should start charging an extra service charge for hooking people up to the hotspot map sites, kind of like how the phone company charges for directory assistance. One can imagine municipalities providing free “beacons” that provide a wide-area hotspot for bootstrap purposes which is capable of nothing more than looking up other hotspots.
It is not hard to imagine someone setting up a WAP or GPRS/GSM accessible service with automatic location-based lookup of the nearest hotspot, so that travellers could quickly use their cell phone to find the nearest free connection. But then, it’s not clear if anyone would go through all of that trouble if they already had a GPRS/GSM device they could connect their laptop/tablet through. Sometimes “free” isn’t worth the cost. On the other hand, if you could count on reliable wireless bootstrap, you could discontinue yourcellphone servicecompletelyand use voice over IP.
Another fun thing to think about is hotspot spam. It is a trivial matter, on any wireless gateway, to make sure that the user sees the page thatyou want them to see, the first time (or every time) they try to access any page at all on the web. If they haven’t already, I can guarantee that some hotspot operators will do this to “brand” their hotspots. The first time you use the hotspot of some ‘leet haxor, you’ll be assulted with a Flash animation about how cool he is, and then you’ll be able to use his hotspot to connect.
It is just a short step from that to advertisement. Someone will start a company selling advertisement, and will lease space in local buildings to provide “free” hotspots. You’ll have to sit through an advertisement, and then you’ll get free access. You’ll have to watch an advertisement every five minutes to stay connected.
Or, how about “ad jammers”? It could be quite inexpensive to mass-manufacture small, battery-operated wireless beacons that pretend to be a wireless hotspot, but are capable of nothing other than serving a megabyte or two worth of advertisments to anyone unlucky enough to connect. I think maximum $10 per pop for these devices, and you could hire vagrants to dump them in trash cans all around the city. You could find out about available porn services andget-rich quick schemesfrom anywhere!