WiFi in the News

Wednesday, 04 August 2004

The first wifi news story I would like to talk about exposes some of my own hobby radio interests, although I haven’t tried any of this sort of thing yet. A couple of teen guys at the DEFCON hacker conference were able to establish a 55.1 mile unamplified wifi connection. Obviously this is point-to-point but it raises an interesting topic. Wifi sharing. Neighbors across the country should be setting this sort of thing up. It would dramatically reduce the cost of broadband for consumers, bring neighbors together, increase the use of homebrew equipment, and provide a partial solution to the “last-mile” broadband problem.

Read the article from Wired News: Wi-Fi Shootout in the Desert (update, they went farther: Hackers Annihilate Wi-Fi Record)

In other news, today, I am pleased to announce my laptop runs Ndiswrapper and the 802.11G Intel Centrino drivers. I did it and it wasn’t hard! I am happy. I write this article while running on the wireless network here at home.

Here’s some links to for those who’d like to get started:

I also found the INSTALL file in the Ndiswrapper tar ball to be helpful.