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http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0133/meyers.php
NYC Village Voice
Week of August 15 - 21, 2001

Motley Crew Beams No-Cost Broadband to New York
High Speed, Freed
by Peter Meyers

"This is why I love New York," says Anthony Townsend, standing in
the middle of Washington Square Park, holding his laptop computer
like a butler's tray and scanning the adult playground the place
becomes on hot summer evenings. Where else, he asks, can you
walk around with a computer, surf the Web, and go utterly
unnoticed?

As if to prove his invisibility, or perhaps to demonstrate that he belongs, he
hoists his machine like some digital prayerbook and begins chanting: "Jesus!
Jesus! Thank you!"

No one—not the guy playing the Ramones on acoustic guitar, not the tonguing
teenage lovers—notices this modern miracle worker or the cybernet he has cast
around them. Along with some 30 other volunteers in a group called NYCwireless,
Townsend's on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones: small areas,
often called free networks, where people can tap into high-speed connections,
without cables or phone lines, at no cost.

Call it a marriage of the Web and pirate radio, forged even as big telecom
interests bicker over the rights to wireless-spectrum licenses. Last week, the
White House announced it would ask the Supreme Court to uphold the seizure of
licenses from Next-Wave, which bought them at auction but failed to make
payments.

Meanwhile, the Washington Square network already exists—thanks to a homemade
setup Townsend rigged in late July in his nearby office at NYU, where he's a
fellow at the Taub Urban Research Center. Townsend, 27, used an antenna to
broadcast his connection a few hundred feet out into the park. So far only a
handful of these networks have been activated in New York. But if the group has
its way, zones like these will soon be springing up everywhere, spreading Net
connections like streetlamp light to anyone willing to put a cheap plug-in card
into a computer.

Aside from the opportunity to perform evangelical chants, why, you might ask,
would Townsend and his friends do this?

For starters, they have an earnest desire to share, a hacker's love of all
things jury-rigged, and an almost quixotic yen to make connections—human links,
as it were—in an impersonal city. Yet the simplest explanation is that they do
it because they can.

Building a free network requires some expertise, but using one is almost easy.
Those who wish to log on simply need to slip a "WiFi" card—which contains a
mini-antenna, costs about $100, and is available at computer shops—into a slot
on their machine and enter a few basic settings. Then they can cruise the
Internet and send e-mail as they normally would. The NYCwireless Web site,
www.nycwireless.net, lists a handful of the currently active networks.

Sharing resources like this is a longstanding tradition within the technology
world, from kids swapping music to programmers teaming up to improve Linux.
That's what attracted Terry Schmidt, an independent consultant, who joined
forces with Townsend this spring. Schmidt, 25, says he wanted to contribute his
know-how to a group effort. "I wanted to give something back," he says.

But free things draw suspicion these days, now that share-the-wealth movements
like Napster have acquired the taint of the mass-looting spree. Schmidt, who
along with Townsend acts as an informal spokesperson for NYCwireless, firmly
rejects the Napster comparison and says his group is simply giving the bandwidth
they pay for to anyone who happens to be nearby. "I'm sharing it with people,"
he says. "I'm not selling it. I'm not making a profit off it."

Which doesn't make Internet service providers any happier. Though most broadband
companies don't seem much aware of free networks, a Time Warner Cable
spokesperson says such sharing could violate the terms of its residential-
subscriber agreement.

In any case, Schmidt says he spends lots of time attempting to explain that this
is not some new dotcom business idea, that there is no commercial hook beneath
the giveaway lure. At a recent tech convention in Las Vegas, he tried again.
"They would ask, 'What's the business model?' " he recalls, "and we'd say,
'There is no business model. It's free.' "

Those in the free-network community, both in New York and elsewhere, treat the
project mostly as a hobby. Part of this reluctance stems from wanting to avoid
the responsibilities of running a business. If no one gets charged, then no one
can complain when things don't work. And by not charging, they're much less
likely to draw the attention of those supplying the bandwidth they're sharing.
But it's also evident that a communitarian impulse powers their most ambitious
vision, of a city blanketed with public Internet access.

"I want to make it an attractive thing for everybody to use. I want to make it
easy," says Schmidt, who thinks broadband connectivity is close to becoming as
necessary as water or electricity, and as such should be in public places, as
available as drinking fountains.

On May 3, Schmidt got the first NYCwireless network up and running in a coffee
shop near his Upper East Side apartment. "Basically, that was a nightmare," he
says, sounding as genuinely disturbed as a horror movie fan spooked by a scary
flick. Convincing the shop was not a problem. As he told the management, the
project would cost them nothing, require no work on their part, and enable their
customers to surf the Web for free. The problem was that between Schmidt's place
and the café—a distance of about 100 feet as the crow flies—stood several 16-
inch-thick brick walls and enough curves to exhaust even the strongest radio
wave.

First, Schmidt experimented with a variety of powerful antennas and signal
amplifiers, all of which, given unobstructed views, can be used to propel a
signal many miles. No luck. Then the brainstorm hit. The handiest solution to
the wireless network, he realized, was to run a wire. Off he went to Home Depot,
where he bought 250 feet of Ethernet cable to pipe the broadband connection from
his apartment to an access point in the coffee shop, which would in turn
distribute the signal. After securing permission from his landlord—who also
owned the coffee shop's building—he set about finding a means to get the cable
through those walls.

Enter Schmidt's friend who works as a metal fabricator. He customized the bit
needed to bore a slender channel through such thick walls, leaving only the
matter of drilling the actual hole. For this Schmidt used a hammer drill, which
is kind of like a jackhammer for the do-it-yourself crowd. Schmidt was then able
to run the cable from his apartment to the shop, where he snaked it into a
Rubbermaid container that held the miniature broadcast antenna.

In some ways that's when the real work started, as group members were forced to
grapple with the question of what their wireless network might evolve into and
how it might be used. Townsend, the urban planner, has visions of location-based
services delivering information to people according to where they are. But he
admits to not knowing exactly how a large-scale system of free networks will
function. "What we're doing is building an infrastructure," he says, confident
that once it's in place people will figure out things to do with it—especially
once they start carrying handheld computers with wireless connections.

Creating a truly widespread system will take more than a handful of volunteers.
The most optimistic members of NYCwireless talk of a "cloud" of free WiFi
networks filling the skies of New York City with Internet connectivity. As it
turns out, thousands of private corporate networks already exist, having been
designed to give employees wireless broadband connections.

Those in NYCwireless know this is so because a member recently went out "war
driving," a method for detecting active WiFi networks that involves outfitting a
car with global positioning technology, a hood-mounted antenna, and a suite of
special software. The term comes from "war dialing" (popularized in the Matthew
Broderick movie War Games), in which phone number after phone number is
automatically dialed in the search for a modem.

War driving is of interest to the free-network movement for two reasons: It
helps demonstrate the ubiquity of WiFi networks and exposes the security
problems that need to be addressed for the networks to be secure and,
potentially, more popular. The drive through Manhattan, which covered only a
portion of midtown, identified approximately 1400 WiFi networks.

Though many of these networks were inaccessible to the average WiFi card-
carrying computer user, anyone with a little networking savvy could likely break
in. Security flaws are as much a concern to free-network operators as they are
to their corporate counterparts, since network abuse—sending out spam or
threatening e-mail—could lead to their being shut down. War driving helps raise
awareness within the tech community that these networks are not yet secure.

Ultimately, a more pressing question is whether ordinary people will start using
these free networks. According to Schmidt, three months after establishing the
access point, only about one person per day taps the connection. Hooking up,
after all, requires someone with not only the wherewithal to buy a wireless card
but also the desire to play with what many people see as a work tool.

Whether these free zones flourish remains to be seen. But by another measure the
effort is already a success. Adam Shand, a Portland, Oregon-based advocate of
the movement, observes that "computers are fundamentally an isolating
technology."

Because the Internet helps connect people at a distance, the computer-dependent
have spent less time hanging around each other. Wireless free networks—both
because of the work required to build them and the signal's limited range—could
bring back the fun of being together. Rather than seeking an escape from 24/7
Web access, people could leave their desks and wander out to the digital
commons, no longer isolated.

Back in Washington Square Park, Townsend's just happy everything checks out. He
tests the first live feed of streaming video. It's of a teenage girl on CNN,
talking about what Ecstasy did to her. "I didn't care about anything except
doing X," she says. "I didn't want to wake up unless it was to do X."

Townsend stares at the screen. "This is fucking cool," he says. "This is better
than 3G"—the high-speed network cell phone companies are hyping. "That's not
even half the speed of what we're getting. And it
works."

**** **** MAJOR PROTON EVENT IN PROGRESS **** ****

A category S2 (Moderate) Solar Radiation Storm is in progress. This
event began with high energy proton flux above event levels at 7:05
p.m. Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) on August 15, 2001.

Current proton fluxes are at a level equivalent to S2 (Moderate) on the
NOAA Solar Radiation Storm scale. Effects may include, but are not
limited to, single-event upsets on satellites in earth orbit, and
degradation of high frequency radio communications at polar latitudes,
also known as Polar Cap Absorption (PCA). The NOAA S-scale is defined
by the lower energy proton flux (10 MeV), but because this event also
includes a significant higher energy flux component (100 MeV), other
effects are also possible, including increased radiation exposure for
manned space flight operations, more widespread radio communication
effects, and a wider range of potential impacts on satellites, such as
"snow" in imaging systems and degradation of satellite components due
to radiation exposure.

Major proton events generally follow energetic x-ray flares from active
sunspot regions on the visible side of the sun. This event was
somewhat unusual in that no notable x-ray enhancement was seen on
satellite monitors prior to its occurrence, suggesting a more unusual
"backside" event, from a sunspot region that has rotated beyond the
side of the sun facing Earth.

Subsequent imagery received from the LASCO instrument on the SOHO
satellite, operated by NASA/ESA, confirm that a major coronal mass
ejection (CME) emerged from a backside source starting at about 5:54
p.m. MDT on August 15th. Proton enhancements were first observed on
the SOHO SIS instrument at 6:25 p.m. MDT, indicating that these
particles were ejected from the sun at a velocity near 30% of the speed
of light. By 7:05 p.m. MDT, the flux of energetic protons observed on
the NOAA GOES-8 satellite had risen to the threshold for a major proton
event (as determined by 100 MeV proton flux). A second threshold for
lower energy protons (10 MeV proton flux) was reached at 7:35 p.m. MDT.
An associated Polar Cap Absorption (PCA) began at 8:10 pm MDT.

The last S2 (Moderate) event with flux levels similar to the one in
progress occurred on 18 April 2001, and lasted for about two days.
Interestingly, that event was also caused by a backside CME.

House music causes impotence