in case you haven't heard - rob flickenger of nocat and "building communiy wireless networks" fame was recently hospitalized for serious injuries inflicted from a fall from a roof while installing an antenna. i really, truly wish rob a speedy recovery.

speaking of rob, i ran across sputnik recently and wondered if they were using nocat as a foundation. well, it turns out - they are and it sounds like they've made some nice enhancements:

"Yep, our new company, Sputnik, has created an all-in-one Smart AP (uses the HostAP drivers for Linux), router, dynamic firewall (iptables-based) with bandwidth shaping, and a modified NoCatAuth captive portal that authenticates with our backend authentication, settlement and billing systems. It doesn't currently authenticate against RADIUS, Active Directory, or NDS just yet, these are some additional features that we're building into the backend as we speak."

"Oh, and by the way, all of the gateway code is open source, including the changes and improvements we made to NoCatAuth (well _duh_, it's GPL'd code)."

nice sounding stuff. dave sifry and other linuxcare co-founders are behind the recently launched company.

i haven't made up my mind about the proposed fees for webcasts. while it's certainly not good news for businesses like live365, it's not completely devastating for "microbroadcasters". if i pull out my trusty calculator, i can see that if you're a "pop" microbroadcaster you'll play around 14 songs an hour. according to the "per use" fee structure for commercial webcasters, this translates to around 2 cents per hour per listener and for a non-commercial webcaster you'll have to anty up 7 tenths of a cent per hour per listener. even if you assume that most microbroadcasters are somehow deemed to fit into the "commercial" category and can somehow muster a thousand listeners per broadcast, then you're talking $20 per hour, which is not nothing, but isn't a deal killer either - if you're running a weekly show. then again, if you get more than a thousand listeners and you want to run a nightly show then the costs begin to skyrocket. hmmm. i guess i'll have to let the dust settle a bit before i commence with a nightly webcast.

after 3 years of adequate performace, i think it's time to heed this sage advice:

"First, just come to terms with the fact that Windows 95 and 98 will, in normal use, slowly pollute themselves into broken-ness."

i'm going with john robb's assessment of the affordable os-less walmart pc. i think the analysts are missing the boat. i'm in the market for a throw-away home lan server and i'd probably buy one if i had more information on the parts and pieces to ensure compatability with linux.

watch as is goes from bad to worse for paypal . i know that people have been predicting the death of paypal for awhile, but this is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

o.k. i take it back. the message i got yesterday about evergreen wasn't odd at all. not compared to the email that i got today:

"Did you see Betty Cutter on 48 hours the other night? Wasn't she your professor at Evergreen. I know Shoshanah worked with her too. They had some story about the guy that they called the Hollywood Bank Robber. Do you remember him. It turns out that he was a Greener many years ago. He used to make crystal meth in the chemistry labs at Evergreen before he turned to bank robbery. He was living in a tree house in Olympia the whole time we were there. It's nice to see Greeners making the news. He's dead by the way. I think the cops shot him. Anyway, I just thought you should know."

wow. high wierdness. i knew a guy who lived in a teepee, but i don't recall meeting "hollywood" who apparently lived in a tree house.

i guess maybe you have to be an alumni of that bastion of educational liberalism known as the evergreen state college to understand just how odd it is to receive an e.mail with the following pronouncement:

"Log on to alumni-owned radio station MIXX 96 to hear the Evergreen men's basketball conference championship games."

when i was there we didn't have no damn sports. well, i guess there was a really informal rugby team. i mean, this is an institution whose mascot is a giant mollusc and whose motto is omni extaris, Latin for "Let it all hang out." sports? feh!

over at the most striking thing about matt's observation about mp3s and the recording industry is that it even needs to be said at all:

"Everyone with a computer I know uses them, rips them from their CDs, and shares them with others. Napster (and later on, Kazaa) built massive worldwide networks based on the sharing of these files, spreading terabytes of files to millions of users. And yet, you can't walk into a store anywhere in America and buy a physical form of media embedded with mp3s."

"Given the ubiquity of mp3s among consumers, the continued rise in popularity of the format despite anything that's been put in place to stop them, and the millions of dollars being spent on mp3 encoding/decoding software and hardware, I no longer think the RIAA operates solely on fear. At this point, they're simply running on stupidity."

and yet it does need to be said.

it's hard to believe that it has been nearly two years since infoworld ran with the wonderfully straightforwardly-titled Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy' and the recording industry still can't seem to get a clue. just look at the facts, ma'am - you're spending alot of money attempting to kill a messenger which is only getting stronger.

over at skippingdotnet there's a nice little story about actually realizing the primary benefit of open source software:

"Where I am headed, what I wanted to share with you today, is an example of people working with Open Source software and seeing benefits from the actual Open Source-osity of the software. Not just benefits from the fact that the software is free, nor just benefits from the fact that the software works extremely well, but benefits from the fact that the source code is available for people to do with as they please."

not that i'm trying to stop you from going out and purchasing programming jabber, but a reviewer's copy on the manuscript is online. i was procrastinating on purchasing the book, but based on the usefulness of the chapter on the jabber.xml file, i'm picking-up a copy quick-like.

Easy 802.11b Wireless for Small Businesses highlights the conundrum facing anyone attempting to make money from 802.11 connectivity - it's so darn cheap and easy that it's hard to justify not offering it for free:

"One of the first questions a business owner needs to answer is “Why am I providing wireless access for my customers?” If the answer is to find a way to make a bit of money, then obviously, a charge is in order. However, given that it costs so little to provide wireless access, most businesses should probably look at providing this as an amenity for the customers, just as the furniture and the pictures on the wall are meant to be. It should be a perk that encourages customers to come back. Often these are referred to as "value-added" services."

and relatedly, "tapping in freely" gives nocat some good press - complete with surprisingly agnostic comments from ISPs:

""The intended use is for the single home or business," said Fletcher Cook, a spokesman for Pacific Bell. "While our policy does not prohibit this, it is not the intended use. It increases vulnerability and security, but we don't see this as widespread problem."

Dane Jasper, president of Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa Internet service provider, even applauds the network organizers' ingenuity."

TextAds:

"TextAds are a simple, polite, and inexpensive alternative to banners and other online advertising. TextAds provide all of the benefits of other forms of online advertising without the annoying downsides."

"TextAds can be run on any Linux based server running PHP, Apache, and MySQL."

[ via jy ]

simson garfinkel's latest column for mit tech review has lots of sage advice for anyone attempting to start a wireless service:

"One of the most surprising things we learned from launching our Internet startup was that providing wireless Internet service is really cheap. What ended up bankrupting the company were all the ancillary services we had to develop—credit card billing, technical support, the corporate Web site and the various security measures we had to put in place to prevent unauthorized use of the network by nonsubscribers. Organizations that aren’t trying to make money providing wireless Internet service can do away with all of these measures and offer the service for free.

This isn’t just some techno-utopian notion—it’s today’s reality."

so, if your site is the sole site preventing a search term for qualifying for a googlewhack - as is the case with "WLAN Aspen Boingo Benchmark" - what is that?