snowdeal logo

archives archives

ex machina


amen to david sifry's homily on the dangers of playing somebody else's game with the language you use:

" Community broadband activists: We need to be careful about how the media portays us, lest we become painted with the same "hacker, cracker, pirate, lawbreaker" brush that the MPAA and RIAA love to paint users of file swapping services and internet radio. This starts with terminology and concrete example. Why do we call it wardriving, for example? Or Warchalking? Well, it sounds cool, and we techies like the sounds of the terms. It sounds cool and dangerous. But it plays into the monopolist's hands.

We can battle this. Get involved in, and promote a low-income or egalitarian use of WiFi, like a project to wire towns in the Dominican Republic or set up wireless access at your local library."

i'm not buying doc's assessment that it's too late to "repress" the words. this whole crazy wifi thing is still in it's infancy and almost nobody in the general public has an inkling on what wardriving or warchalking mean.

i do know that almost everybody i know outside the tech community thinks i'm doing something "wrong" just by wardriving - even though i have no intention of leaching off other people's bandwidth. the problem is compounded by the words we use and i doubt trying to convince people that it's just innocuous "[w]ireless [a]ccess [r]econnaissance" is going to make a bit of diffference.

maybe something like netmapping, airmapping or wapmapping? maybe not. but i'll bet that an alternative catchy phrase could sweep through the blogosphere just as quickly as warchalking.

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::
7/04/2002 03:14:00 PM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment


[ rhetoric ]

"it is hard to be brave," said piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "it is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us."

the complete tales & poems of winnie the pooh

[ about ]

this site chronicles the continuing adventures of my son, odin, who was unexpectedly born on the fourth of july at 25 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces.

he's quite a fighter and you can always send him a postcard to the most current address listed here if you're inspired by his adventures. see the postcard project/google maps mashup to see a map of the postcards.

if you're new, you can browse the archives to catch up. and don't forget to watch a few movies that i made while we were in the neonatal intensive care unit. or if you want the abridged version and you can find a copy, you can read about his adventures in the november 2005 issue of parents magazine.



[ search ]

[ outbound ]

daddytypes / blogging baby /

rebeldad / thingamababy / The Continuing Adventures of Super-Preemie / dooce /

[ schwag ]

look snazzy and support the site at the same time by buying some snowdeal schwag!

[ et cetera ]

valid xhtml 1.0?

This site designed by
Eric C. Snowdeal III .
© 2000-2005