Thread: Panera Bread
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Old 02-09-2004   #8 (permalink)
Novilio
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Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 254
Quote:
Originally posted by decoy5657
<-- I also live in Louisville, I'm trying to get together a list of palces offering LEGIT free wifi :-)

Any other places?! great find at panera, never would have thought of that...
Schlotzky's Deli is one place to check--they're rolling out their free hotspot program little by little. We really really need what I call "SSIDChalking"; that is, embedding a standard tag in a free/open hotspot's SSID to indicate its legal status. The obvious one would be something like this:

[[ )( ]] Porky Perk Coffee House

If Porky's decided to charge for the service, the tag might look like this:

[[ )( $ ]] Porky Perk Coffee House

The symbols should be enclosed in some kind of frame (I used double brackets here as a simple example) to make parsing by utilities easier.

I talked about this in my book, and it's so obvious a thing I'm surprised it hasn't come up in discussion about the industry. Connecting to the wrong AP is a serious problem in an industry that combines non-technical people with idiots who don't turn on WEP. Ideally, our client adapters should be able to tell by inspection whether a hotspot is legal for us to connect to. It shouldn't be left completely to the judgment of the user, as it is now, or to completely dumb clients that will gleefully connect to whatever signal is strongest at its antennas.

--73--

--Novilio
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