On Feb 23, 11:00 am, Paul Cassel
wrote:
Skip Gundlach wrote:
February 19th - The key to success in sailing - Part Three

Well, as I was saying, sailing successfully to a key, anyway...

When we left you, we'd anchored off the north side of Rodriguez Key
and found a nice internet connection.

Where are these connections coming from? Are you picking up people's
houses wireless but unsecured connections?

-paul


Hi, Paul, and group,

The signals I get, from place to place, vary with location. In
Coinjock, e.g.,the marinas either pass out their codes or they are
open, as they are in Great Bridge - along with, sometimes, other
anonymous open sites. In Charleston, there's municipally free wifi,so
all of the marinas opened their accounts, too, as nobody would bother
to pay for a site when there was a freebie visible, not to mention the
hassle of keeping up with who might be using it. In anchorages,
usually depending on population density, I may see anything from the
hollywoodfreewifi/hollywoodwifi, a muincipally sponsored freebie (just
register), or another location had a Christian conference center with
a similarly open site (register, agree not to download porn), many
sites with SSIDs named suggestively (like xxfreewifi, where xx is
whomever or whatever is offering it), or just anonymously, and
classically, linksys, belkin, motorola (the one in Rodriguez), default
and a few others which escape me right now. Here in MIA, it's "youth
sailing" along with several of the aforementioned classics. I also
have, when it's occasionally much stronger than the others, a
subscription to Beacon, found in many marine centers, such as Tampa/
St.Pete where I was until I left, St. Simons, and here, also, in MIA
(many repeaters from here to the end of the channel).

At times, if I'm relatively close to the shore, as was the case when
we were doing the up-and-downs in this series, I was able to reach
open sites as we cruised. Many times I'll see a hotel, as I did in
Ft. Lauderdale (two, actually).

If you're in an anchorage with me, you're likely to see my SSID,
Flying Pig, likewise unencrypted. There's a movement (Larry can
provide more detail, for sure) by many knowledgeable folks to
intentionally leave their sites open, or name them such that it's
obvious that's the intent. If I were ashore, I'd have broadband in my
home, as I did for as long as it was available to me. However, I'd
also have it open - so that I could perhaps see it from the dock, or
even out in the part of the lake which was in front of my home. But so
could my neighbor, as he cruised his Grand Banks every evening at
sunset, if he wanted to...

OTOH, I'd not go to the expense of setting up a high power antenna -
and with the exception of marinas or pay services or the occasional
municipally owned, nobody else does, either. OTOH, with my setup, I
can reliably see up to a couple of miles away from a garden-variety
home router, so t may well be some private citizen's signal I'm
using. Over in alt.internet.wireless, there are frequent discussions
on the concept of the ethics of using an open site - but there are
also innumerable (well, I suppose you could count them) websites
devoted to wardriving, the science of locating open sites. I chose to
believe that if I can see it, and it's open, given the simplicity of
programming them these days, that the owners intend that if it's not
encrypted...

Given that I'm not downloading movies or otherwise using a lot of
bandwidth (even Vonage only uses 30k, and Skype even less, but at the
cost of latency), my usage, other than the curious geek looking at
traffic, is negligible, and of no account to the owner, even if it
weren't intended for open distribution...

L8R

Skip

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