The Wireless LAN (WLAN) Top Sites List has got a good selection of links [from: JB Wifi]

Wild story about a semi-autonomous balloon antenna. Floating at 60,000 feet and maintaining position for 12 months with large slow turning propellers, the balloon is used as an antenna to beam WiFi down to an area of 10 miles radius. [from: JB Wifi]

Just discovered Smart Convergence, another Wireless Lan Blog. Eduardo has got some good coverage of Project Rainbow, the Intel initiative to spread WIFi everywhere. [from: JB Wifi]

SMC adds multi-function Cable Modem gateway ANother multi-function consumer unit. This one's cable modem, WiFi AP, 4 ethernet ports and a firewall. All for $230. [from: JB Wifi]

Keep an eye on SUPERNOVA 2002 There's a stellar cast of speakers and likely to be lots of blogging. [from: JB Ecademy]

This one's a must read for Ecademy London WiFi enthusiasts. Wi-Fi News: London Hot Spot Report : Guest report on London Commercial Hot Spots from Tim Woolford.

Has anyone else got stories of using hotspots from the London streets? [from: JB Wifi]

International Wi-Fi Meetup Day -- Join other Wi-Fi Geeks : Meetup with other local Wi-Fi geeks to talk about the latest developments in wireless technology Wed Dec 11, @7pm

London options include
- CommsPort Limited, 68 Goswell Road, London,
- Marquis of Granby, 2 Rathbone Street, London,
- Jerusalem, 33-34 Rathbone Place, London, [from: JB Wifi]

I just came across an amazing statistic. "Of the 300,466 books published in the U.S. from 1927-1956, only 9,240 are currently available from publishers at any price." The relevance of the 1956 date is that the Sonny Bono copyright extension bill in the USA makes these books copyright rather than public domain. So that's 291,226 out-of-print books that you cannot buy anywhere because the book industry is hoarding it.

This reminds me of Janis Ian's proposal to the record industry. What if the book industry and the record industry created a site where their entire back catalogue of unpublished work was made available for download at a really cheap price? Like a few pence for each song and maybe a few tens of pence for each book. Does anyone think that wouldn't make a ton of money for them out of content that they're not exploiting anyway at the moment? I can think of a whole string of books and music from that canon that I would buy if I could. Like John Shirley's early work; Lewis Shiner's early work; anything by Bob Shea; the albums from the Grateful Dead spin off bands in the mid 70s; Reebop Kwaku Baah & Ganoua, the record of moroccan drummers that I stupidly leant to someone. The dub versions of Rico's Man from Waraika; And so on. [from: JB Ecademy]

Guy Kewney's been using Free WiFi access in St Albans pubs. The deal is pretty good, after all. The pub gets broadband installed, without having to do it all themselves (they pay the broadband) and they get "behind-the-bar" laptop computer for visitors who didn't know there was Internet access, and who will now come back and use it another time. If they sell three extra pints a day, they're breaking even. [from: JB Wifi]

David Reed has a large collection of links to papers on Open spectrum and scaling limits of wireless. [from: JB Wifi]

Very cool map of access points in Estonia covering both free and commercial hotspots. This is a great model of how this should be done in other countries and follows on from my ranting here about the lack of a definitive map for the UK and USA. [from: JB Wifi]

Wonderful, official WiFi Warchalk in Estonia. [from: JB Wifi]

Looks like Blogdex has been bombed by a German domain registry scam. The top 25 is packed with entries each with 8 links. Hopefully they'll all disappear soon.

A new player has appeared in the WiFi market in Agatal.  (full article). They've got an interesting twist in targeting two specific markets, hospitals and high density housing (HDUs) such as apartment blocks. Both these have some common characteristics. in that there is often a common owner and they pack a large number of potential customers into a small area. The aim is to provide broadband access site wide by leasing a conventional high speed T1 line into the site and then distributing internet access via WiFi. This works out dramatically cheaper for both customer and owner than running lots of broadband ADSL direct to each outlet or by running Cat5 everywhere to wiring closets. [from: JB Wifi]

Taj to offer wireless broadband service : HindustanTimes.com The Indian Hotels Company is planning to equip it's 60 most prestigious in India with WiFi. [from: JB Wifi]

A little while ago I blogged an entry here about an article in The Times about Internet access in hotels. There was a reply yesterday saying that The Thistle Hotel group intended to provide broadband access in hotel rooms in 400 hotels round Britain. There's just one catch, the cost is 50p per minute with a ceiling (£25?) per day if you use enough. Now either I'm hopelessly out of touch with the bright world of expense account travel or this is extortionate. Working purely from memory you understand, it would seem therefore that 10 minutes internet access in your hotel room is roughly equivalent to one unimaginative soft porn movie on the pay-per-view. A bargain then ;) [from: JB Ecademy]

Seems as good a time as any to remind people of William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer.

CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 : An article loosely based (ahem!) on an interview with Consume.Net's James Stevens. I loved this bit. Wireless networks use microwave radio adapters, known as WiFis, which can be arranged to form a continuous "cloud" of connectivity. This loop goes by the pan-European name "elektrosmog." Elektrosmog. Right.

There's also a picture that rivals the BBC's efforts. It's the Pope looking at what appears to be a Dell laptop with the caption "A broad church: More and more people are logging on" :)
[from: JB Wifi]

For those of you who run a GPRS PDA, Do you run a firewall (like Zonealarm) and can you access TSL/SSL secured sites ? Just curious. [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's an interesting web service: PGP Keyserver Service - WSDL v1.1 This service allowes you to query the PGP key domainserver for keys and retrive the result in XML. You can also retrive keyblocks from the server and submit new ones. Bet you can think of interesting things to do with this one. [from: JB Ecademy]