Boing Boing » wifi

Amazing wireless whitespace technology bringing free WiFi to SXSW

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 04:16:21 +0000

Elliot Noss sez,

I thought you'd be interested in something we are helping with at SXSW this weekend. a group of folks are taking advantage of unlicensed radio spectrum to provide high-speed backhaul to local WiFi access points all over SXSW. In Austin, there are 14 of these open channels using whitespace that are available. we are leveraging this. on Tuesday, the FCC will close comments on its plan to auction off many of these "whitespaces. the 'We Heart Wifi' initiative is collecting signatures on the following petition. Even if folks aren't at SXSW, they can sign on:
To all FCC Commissioners:
Please follow through on your proposal to open up a large slice of high-quality spectrum for open networks. Doing so would help create the competition necessary to extend more high-speed broadband—including 'super WiFi' and other future innovations—to more people."

We ♥ WiFi - Ting.com

Six-strikes US copyright punishments will harm open WiFi

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:38:32 +0000

You may have heard Jill Lesser, Executive Director of the Center for Copyright Information, explain that America's six-strikes copyright punishment system would not harm open WiFi. Adi Kamdar explains why Ms Lesser's totally mistaken:

Termination may not be part of the CAS, but that's not the point—the program still uses "protecting copyright" as an excuse to seriously hinder a user's online experience. For example, CAS involves not just "education" but also "Mitigation Measures," such as slowing down Internet speeds to 256 kbps for days—rendering your connection all but unusable in today's era of videochats and Netflix.
Lesser doesn't think that's a problem. As she told the radio show On The Media: "The reduction of speed, which one or more of the ISPs will be using as a mitigation measure, is first of all only 48 hours, which is far from termination."
But that's 48 hours of lower productivity and limited communication across the globe, based on nothing more than a mere allegation of copyright infringement.

Don't Be Fooled: "Six Strikes" Will Undoubtedly Harm Open Wireless

EFF's Open Wireless campaign: help your neighbors, improve anonymity, support innovation

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:29:48 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is stepping up its open wireless campaign, which encourages people and businesses to leave their Internet connections open to the public, and offers advice on doing this safely and sustainably. As EFF points out, most WiFi networks are latent for most of the time, and there are a million ways that leaving your network accessible to passersby or neighbors can really help out, from emergency access during disasters to the urgent need to send an email, look up a phone number, or check directions. EFF's Adi Kamdar writes,

We believe there are many benefits to having a world of open wireless. Two of the big ones for us have to do with privacy and innovation.
Open wireless protects privacy. By using multiple IP addresses as one shifts from wireless network to wireless network, you can make it more difficult for advertisers and marketing companies to track you without cookies. Activists can better protect their anonymous communication by using open wireless (though Tor is still recommended).
Innovations would also thrive: Smarter tablets, watches, clothing, cars—the possibilities are endless. In a future with ubiquitous open Internet, smartphones can take advantage of persistent, higher quality connections to run apps more efficiently without reporting your whereabouts or communications. Inventors and creators would not have to ask permission of cell phone companies to utilize their networks, both freeing up radio spectrum and reducing unnecessary barriers to entry.
This movement is just beginning, but in a sense it has always been around. People, businesses, and communities have already been opening up their wireless networks, sharing with their neighbors, and providing an important public good. We want this movement to grow without unnecessary legal fears or technical restraints.

Why We Have An Open Wireless Movement

JetBlue planning free in-flight Wi-Fi rollout in early 2013

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:22:49 +0000

The Verge reports that US-based airline JetBlue will "roll out high-speed wireless networking in the first quarter of 2013," and that the service will be free for passengers. Instead of GoGo, "which Jetblue derides as slow and unsatisfactory," the airline will use supplier ViaSat.

Finnish court: open WiFi owners not responsible for copyright infringement

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:21:36 +0000

A Finnish court has ruled that merely operating an open WiFi access point does not make you liable for copyright infringements committed on your network. From the defense attorney's press release:

This alleged copyright infringement had taken place in a specific 12-minute period in July 14 2010, a date when a summer theater play with an audience of around hundred people was held at the premises of the former school owned and resided by the lady.
The applicants were unable to provide any evidence that the connection-owner herself had been involved in the file-sharing. The court thus examined whether the mere act of providing a WiFi connection not protected with a password can be deemed to constitute a copyright-infringing act.
Crucially, the applicants also sought an injunction to prevent the defendant for committing any similar acts in the future. Had the injunction been granted, the legal status of various open WiFi providers would have turned out extremely difficult, as rights-owners would have been provided with a powerful legal weapon to shut them down in cases of similar, arguably insignificant infringements by incidental visitors and customers...
Finally, the court concluded that the WiFi owner cannot be deemed liable for the infringements actually committed by third parties.

Finnish court rules open WiFi network owner not liable for infringement

(Image: Warchalking, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from isaacmao's photostream)

Why communities build their own WiFi: a short video explainer and a long white-paper

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:08:35 +0000

Christopher sez, "We just released a 90 second animated video that explains why communities build their own broadband networks, often in competition with big cable. For those who want all the details, we just released a massive 75 page white paper examining 3 community fiber networks in depth - Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lafayette, Louisiana; and Bristol, Virginia that is available here."

Community Broadband Networks (via Christopher!)

Say Wi-Fi Hi

Glenn Fleishman — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:19:31 +0000

Mathias Nitzsche had a nifty idea: using Wi-Fi network names to create a connection between the network's owner and those who spot it in their wireless networks list. His aptly named wifis.org site lets you pick a handle and advertise it through your network name, as in wifis.org/glennocschmidt. This creates an account for you on the site, and makes a Web form available at that address that sends email to your Google or Facebook email, whichever you used to create the registration. The visitor never sees your email address. (Nitzsche avoids having his own registration database, which removes some overhead and security risk associated with retaining passwords.)

I contacted Mathias to ask about privacy and security issues, as one might be concerned about email addresses being stored and the association of a Wi-Fi network name with such. He said (and his FAQ notes) that he doesn't reveal information to third parties. While he's based in Germany, his data and application is hosted in the Google App Engine in the United States.

I'd love to see a variant on this idea, in which an existing network name could be paired with a unique few letter long code that someone would then append to their network. Look up the code, and you'd get the same result. I admit Nitzsche's idea is neater, encoding the URL and the identifier all at once.

This is probably a good time to also mention WTFWiFi.com, the site that is to network names what Damn You, Auto Correct! is to rewritten text messages.

US-funded Open Technology Initiative takes to Occupy

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:51:37 +0000

The New America Foundation's Open ~~Network~~ Technology Initiative, a US State Department-funded project to build an "Internet in a suitcase" that can be dropped into repressive zones where protesters need network access and the state is trying to take it away. The project -- a very complex piece of technology -- has gotten to the point where it needs a live test, and lucky for the Open Technology engineers, Occupy DC is just down the street, and that's a great testbed.

The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.
That’s harder to pull off in practice, even under ideal conditions — as anyone who’s tried to link even two Wi-Fi access points in their own home could attest. Now throw in the variables that the access points should work in urban and exposed environments, as well as protest zones like Tahir Square. You’ll want to protect dissidents with encryption and deniability. And you don’t want your beta-testers to be arrested or even killed because of a software bug. All together it’s the kind of challenge engineers like to call “non-trivial”.
“Finding a place to use the system is difficult,” Meinrath said. “Thank God for the Occupy movement.”

U.S.-Funded Internet Liberation Project Finds Perfect Test Site: Occupy D.C.

(Image: Brendan Hoffman/Wired.com)

WiFi firmware that can detect and route around interference from non-WiFi devices

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:34:31 +0000

In Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware (PDF), researchers from U Wisconsin (Madison) document a firmware for WiFi access points that can detect and dynamically adjust to interference from vacuum cleaners, baby monitors, and other non-WiFi devices that operate in WiFi's radio spectrum. This kind of thing is the backbone of the theory of cognitive radio: devices that can use software defined radio, phased-array antennas, and cleverness to route around other devices in the band, which may, eventually, enable the a lot more data to occupy the radio spectrum. In Airshark's case, the cleverness is in using the wireless cards on the computers and other devices as a sensing array to triangulate on interference.

Airshark taps into the application programming interface of wireless cards used on access points to gather data about radio frequencies in the surrounding environment. The software has been trained to recognize signatures of various devices, and can pick them out from the ambient radio noise with more than 90% accuracy even if signals from multiple such devices are present.
False positives were .39% for environments with four or more interfering devices and using various signal strengths. The researchers found the rate was .068% for signals stronger than -80dBm. "We also found its performance to be comparable to a commercial signal analyzer," according to their research paper "Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware."

Software upgrades could produce self-tuning wireless access points, researchers say [networkworld.com]

Toronto Convention Centre charges attendees $150/day to use WiFi

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:54:54 +0000

Are you a busy professional attending an event at the Toronto International Centre? Be prepared to travel in time to an idyllic era when physically leaving the office made you unreachable by your colleagues and peers. Or, if you want to live in the modern era, be prepared to pay the whopping $99/day for "ultra-lite wireless" service at the TIC (if you want to actually use the network in any meaningful way, you'll have to sign up for "extreme wireless" at $150/day).

Event-planners, beware -- your attendees will get gouged, reamed, and screwed if you come to TIC.

Most Expensive Wi-Fi Ever? (Thanks, Parker!)

Happy WiFi Day!

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:10:55 +0000

You may not realize it, but these are the waning hours of WiFi Day -- 8.02.11

Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 03:15:41 +0000

Harold Feld from Public Knowledge sez, "Republicans have proposed forbidding the FCC from allocating any more 'unlicensed' spectrum for WiFi and other uses unless they give wireless companies the opportunity to buy exclusive licenses first. This would effectively mean the end of open spectrum, cutting off investment in the TV white spaces/'Super WiFi.' Public Knowledge has issued an Action Alert, asking those who care about the future of open spectrum and wireless competition to sign up to call their member of Congress on Friday, July 22 and tell them that America needs more unlicensed spectrum that everyone can use -- not just the big wireless companies that can spend billions on licensed spectrum."

Don't think it's worth the trade-off (less unlicensed spectrum and less wireless innovation for very little benefit to either the public or the government's bottom line)? Call your Member of Congress!
We're making this as easy as possible by setting up a day of action this Friday, July 22. To participate, all you need is a mobile phone with the ability to send and receive SMS messages.* If you haven't already signed up for PK Mobile Action Alerts, take a moment to do so now. We'll contact you on Friday with instructions on how to take action.

Don't Let Fox, AT&T and Verizon Buy Their Way Out of Regulation (Thanks, Harold!)

WiFi-sniffing picture frame

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:32:55 +0000

This picture frame, made from an ancient Pentium II laptop, displayes images sniffed out of public WiFi connections: "Many coffee shops in Vancouver feature both local art and wi-fi, so why not combine the two?" Wiretap picture frame [Free Geek Vancouver via JWZ]

Whither Wi-Fi in Warm Weather?

Glenn Fleishman — Tue, 10 May 2011 05:30:26 +0000

Caroline Spelman. PHOTO: Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino One would think from reports today that the UK's secretary of state for the environment and rural affairs, MP Caroline Spelman, had lost her bleeding mind. Spelman has been widely quoted about a new report from her agency, Defra, about the threat to infrastructure from global climate change. It covers the extremes of temperature and the routine occurrence of heat above a normal range for the UK, and more storms and severe weather that could ravage Great Britain. The report is an analysis on what changes need be made to keep bridges from buckling in heat or cracking in cold, and nuclear and fossil-fuel plants from suffering damage from previously unthinkable conditions, as well as quotidian issues like floods polluting water supplies and spreading sewage. It's a ripping read, and, please recall, originates from the Tories, the majority conservative part of a coalition government that completely acknowledges the reality of a range of risk potential from climate change. The Conservatives are no Republicans, no matter what else you may say about them. Nonetheless the report's broader issues were overlooked because of a focus on an exceedingly tiny statement buried in it that Spelman highlighted in a speech unveiling the work. Her prepared remarks have her saying:

Our economy is built on effective transport and communications networks and reliable energy and water supplies. But the economy cannot grow if there are repeated power failures, or goods cannot be transported because roads are flooded and railways have buckled, or if intense rainfall or high temperatures disrupt Wi-Fi signals.

The Daily Telegraph paraphrased her as saying in her speech, "The signal from wi-fi cannot travel as far when temperatures increase. Heavy downfalls of rain also affect the ability of the device to capture a signal." The Guardian is more sensible, summarizing her statement as "higher temperatures can reduce the range of wireless communications, rainstorms can impact the reliability of the signal, and drier summers and wetter winters may cause greater subsidence, damaging masts and underground cables." I was puzzled about this, and consulting the report helped a little. First off, the agency isn't talking about Wi-Fi in particular. As is typical, Wi-Fi is used incorrectly as a catchall phrase when "wireless communications" is meant. The report itself says "wireless," and the focus is on large-scale cellular infrastructure using towers (or "masts" as they're called in the UK). Second, the issue of weather affecting signals seems to be tremendously overemphasized in the cabinet secretary's remarks and, naturally, in the coverage. Remember the terrible study and subsequent reporting that alleged Wi-Fi was killing trees all over Europe? So Wi-Fi plus climate change equals headlines. Extreme heat and heavy precipitation may have some affect on signal propagation, but it's likely to be rather small according to a number of geeks I consulted on the topic. The report asserts, "Location/density of wireless masts may become sub-optimal as wireless transmission is dependent on temperature," but I can't find any citations to support that. Rather, the greater risk appears to be from continuously high temperatures causing tower equipment to function more poorly, reducing signal strength, or to be damaged by the heat. Extreme weather could knock out communications by cutting power and backhaul to poles and towers, or toppling them. That's all quite reasonable, and could result in revised standards for how this sort of equipment is deployed, and potentially regulators could change certification standards for telecom gear based on the anticipation of prolonged extreme temperatures. So MP Spelman hasn't gone crazy. But she might get additional consultation before sounding like part of the tin-hat brigade.

Federal judge: open WiFi doesn't make you liable for your neighbors' misdeeds

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:55:03 +0000

A Federal judge in Illinois has once again rebuffed a copyright troll's request for easy court orders to allow him to connect IP addresses with people. The judge said that open wireless networks and other factors make the connection between IP addresses and defendants difficult, and that making it easy to connect people and IPs would invite extortionate legal claims.

After the recent raids against people whose open wireless networks had been used by their neighbors to download child pornography, many people advised that this was evidence that leaving your wireless network open would make you potentially liable for the misdeeds of people who happened to use it.

But as this case shows, judges can be savvier than that (and they should be, too). Good law shouldn't punish people for being neighborly.

Baker then went on to cite a recent mistaken child porn raid, where an IP address was turned into a name--but the named person hadn't committed the crime. "The list of IP addresses attached to VPR's complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer... The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber's household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment."

After botched child porn raid, judge sees the light on IP addresses

Future, sharing-friendly WiFi design

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:12:49 +0000

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's staff technologist Peter Eckersley writes in "Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement" about the positive aspects of sharing your WiFi with your neighbors and passers-by and about the tragedy of the commons that is puts those of us who generously share our networks with the world at risk. He proposes future direction for protocol and hardware design that allow us to share while keeping our traffic private and while maintaining a minimum amount of bandwidth for our own use.

The problem that's really killing open WiFi is the idea that an unlocked network is a security and privacy risk.
This idea is only partially true. Computer security experts will argue at great length about whether WEP, WPA and WPA2 actually provide security, or just a false sense of security. Both sides are partially correct: none of these protocols will make anyone safe from hacking or malware (WEP is of course trivial to break, and WPA2 is often easy to break in practice), but it's also true that even a broken cryptosystem increases the effort that someone nearby has to go to in order to eavesdrop, and may therefore sometimes prevent eavesdropping.
It doesn't really matter that WiFi encryption is a poor defense against eavesdropping: most computer users only understand the simple message that having encryption is good, so they encrypt their network. The real problem isn't that people are encrypting their WiFi: it's that the encryption prevents them from sharing their WiFi with their friends, neighbours, and strangers wandering past their houses who happen to be lost and in need of a digital map.

Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement

(Image: WiFi signal, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from nnova's photostream)

Brazilian telcoms regulator raids, confiscates and fines over open WiFi

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:28:53 +0000

The latest in a series of reversals from Brazil's new government is an attack on open WiFi. The Brazilian telcoms regulator claims that it is empowered to raid the homes of people with open WiFi networks and seize their routers and then issue hefty fines. This is part of a general series of attacks on sharing and openness in Brazil, including attacks on free content and open culture -- a heartbreaking turn from a nation that has led the world in respect for the open Internet, shared culture, and freedom for most of the century.

On January 27 , Anatel (Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency), the regulatory agency responsible for regulating, executing and supervising the telecommunications sector, seized equipment and fined an internet user R$ 3,000 (approximately $ 1,810 USD) for sharing his wifi connection with neighbors in the city of Teresina, Piauí state (Northeast of Brazil). [GV note: one of the poorest states in Brazil.]

Brazil: Criminalization of Sharing Internet via Wifi (Thanks, Gmoke, via Submitterator!)

(Image: Anatel, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from hapoptosis's photostream)

Password Doesn't Shear Firesheep

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:37:46 +0000

Firesheep sniffs unsecured connections with major Web sites over local networks and lets a user with the Firefox plug-in installed sidejack those sessions. A trope has spread that the way to solve this problem is to password protect open Wi-Fi networks, such as those run by AT&T at Starbucks and McDonald's. The technical argument is that on a WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) network in which a common shared password is used, the access point nonetheless generates a unique key for each client when it connects. You can't just know the network password and decode all the traffic, as with the broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption that first shipped with 802.11b back in the late 1990s.

Steve Gibson, a veteran computer-security writer and developer, suggested this the moment Firesheep was announced. A blog post at security consultant Sophos makes the same suggestion. But it won't work for long.

Gibson notes the key problem to this approach in the comments to his post: every user with the shared key can sniff the transaction in which another client is assigned its unique key, and duplicate it. Further, if you join a network with many clients already connected, you can use the aircrack-ng suite to force a deauthentication. That doesn't drop a client off the network; rather, it forces its Wi-Fi drivers to perform a new handshake in which all the details are exposed to derive the key.

Thus, you could defeat Firesheep today by assigning a shared key to a Wi-Fi network until the point at which some clever person simply grafts aircrack-ng into Firesheep to create an automated way to deauth clients, snatch their keys, and then perform the normal sheepshearing operations to grab tokens. I would suspect this might be dubbed Firecracker

The way around this is to use 802.1X, port-based access control, which uses a complicated system of allowing a client to connect to a network through a single port with just enough access to provide credentials. The Wi-Fi flavor of choice is WPA/WPA2 Enterprise, and the secured method of choice is PEAP. Even if every 802.1X user logs in using PEAP with the same user name and password, the keying process is protected from other users and outside crackers. Update: Reader Elmae suggests "Little Bo PEAP" instead of Firecracker.

Even though 802.1X is built into Mac OS X since about 2004, Windows starting in XP SP2, and available at no cost for GNU/Linux, BSD, Unix, and other variants (as well as for older Mac/Win flavors), it's got just enough overhead that hotspots haven't wanted to use it.

While hotspots aren't liable for people sidejacking with Firesheep or simply sucking down and analyze traffic on their networks (disclosure: IANAL), 802.1X is cheap and easy to implement when there's a single user account and password. It's possible we'll see some uptake. The long-term solution is for all Web sites that handle any data to encrypt the entirety of all user sessions.

Update: Commenter foobar pokes a hole, pun intended, in my suggestion for using 802.1X with a single user name/password: Hole196. This vulnerability, documented by AirTight, afflicts 802.1X networks. It allows a malicious party to spoof the access point for sending broadcast messages, and allows ARP and DNS poisoning. Thus Firecracker could become fARPcracker, and, once again, Firesheep emerges victorious. (I wrote about Hole196 for Ars Technica; it's not that big a deal for the enterprise, but it's perfectly easy to use in a hotspot.) Thus, sites securing all their connections with SSL/TLS becomes the only practical method to ensure privacy and prevent sidejacking.

Photo by Magic Foundry, used via Creative Commons.

WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:21:55 +0000

WPA Cracker is a WiFi security compromiser in the cloud, running on a high-performance cluster. Send them a dump of captured network traffic and $35, and they will try 136 million passwords in 40 minutes, tops (for $17, they'll run the same attack at half speed) -- the same crack would take five days on a "contemporary desktop PC." They also have an extended, 284 million word dictionary that you can run for $55 in 40 minutes. They'll also use the same process to crack the passwords on encrypted ZIP archives.

You're safe if your password isn't in any dictionary, including the special dictionaries used for password cracking (these dictionaries will try random words in combination, as well as common letter-number substitutions such as "1" for "i" and so on). The crack works on WPA and WPA2-locked networks.

Your best bet is a long, random string for a password -- 64 bits of random noise will probably foil something like this for a good time to come. But good luck reading the password aloud to your visiting friend when she needs to get her laptop online.

Questions about WPA Cracker (via Schneier)

Chinese WiFinders with built-in password-crackers

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:13:20 +0000

NetworkWorld reports on a hot-selling Chinese gadget: a WiFi network-locator with a built-in password cracker. These things show you which networks are available in your area and which password to use to get online with them. Alas, they're not stand-alone USB keys with a little LCD display, just WiFi cards with some specialized software. I betcha next year's model is self-contained, though:

With one of the "network-scrounging cards," or "ceng wang ka" in Chinese, a user with little technical knowledge can easily steal passwords to get online via Wi-Fi networks owned by other people.
The kits are also cheap. A merchant in a Beijing bazaar sold one for 165 yuan ($24), a price that included setup help from a man at the other end of the sprawling, multistory building.
The main piece of the kits, an adapter with a six-inch antenna that plugs into a USB port, comes with a CD-ROM to install its driver and a separate live CD-ROM that boots up an operating system called BackTrack. In BackTrack, the user can run applications that try to obtain keys for two protocols used to secure Wi-Fi networks, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). After a successful attack by the applications, called Spoonwep and Spoonwpa, a user can restart Windows and use the revealed key to access its Wi-Fi network.

Wi-Fi key-cracking kits sold in China mean free Internet (via /.

Previously:

Building high-speed wireless in Afghanistan out of garbage

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:52:57 +0000

Volunteers in Afghanistan -- both locals and foreigners from the MIT Bits and Atoms lab -- have been building out a wireless network made largely from locally scrounged junk. They call it "FabFi" and it's kicking ass, especially when compared with the World Bank-funded alternative, which has spent seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars and only managed its first international link last summer.

Pictured below is a makeshift reflector constructed from pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and, ironically enough, a couple of USAID vegetable oil cans that was made today by Hameed, Rahmat and their friend "Mr. Willy". It is TOTALLY AWESOME, and EXACTLY what Fab is all about.
The boys at the Jalalabad Fab Lab came up with their own design to meet the growing demand created by the International Fab surge last September. As usual all surge participants who came from the US, South Africa, Iceland and England paid their own way. Somebody needs to sponsor these people.
For those of you who are suckers for numbers, the reflector links up just shy of -71dBm at about 1km, giving it a gain of somewhere between 5 and 6dBi. With a little tweaking and a true parabolic shape, it could easily be as powerful as the small FabFi pictured above (which is roughly 8-10dBi depending on materials)

The Jalalabad Fab Fi Network Continues to Grow With a Little Help from Their Friends (via Futurismic)

Previously:

Pub fined £8K after user infringes copyright with its WiFi

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 03:07:00 +0000

A British pub has been fined £8,000 because someone using the WiFi there allegedly committed a copyright infringement. Even though British law exempts people who provide Internet access from liability for their users' copyright infringements, the pub was still fined (the details of this are confused).

Graham Cove told ZDNet UK on Friday he believes the case to be the first of its kind in the UK. However, he would not identify the pub concerned, because its owner -- a pubco that is a client of The Cloud's -- had not yet given their permission for the case to be publicised...
According to internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School, where a business operates an open Wi-Fi spot to give customers or visitors internet access, they would be "not be responsible in theory" for users' unlawful downloads, under "existing substantive copyright law".

Pub 'fined £8k' for Wi-Fi copyright infringement (Thanks, Zoran)