Just an opinion…

I watched ‘Firewall’, an IT thriller, during a trip to Bangkok. It is a very interesting movie and features a tired and haggard Harrison Ford, a far cry from the sprightly ‘Indy’ days. The movie itself was so-so and had a lot of plot ‘hitches’ including the usage of parts from a broken fax machine and an iPod to capture account numbers of a screen, that fact that a camera phone is allowed in a high security room of a bank and many such.

But the most glaring ‘hitch’ was when Ford opens up his computer on the street to track the GPS dog finder and find his family. This assumed a city wide wi-fi network being available in Seattle. I did argue this with a friend who thought maybe it did exist in the city where Microsoft is based. The argument was unresolved, but we did not know we were talking about something that could be common in the future.

And the future is now. Google recently launched a free wifi service in the city of Mountain View, Colorado. We don’t know if this is a first of many, a employee comfort initiative (there are about 1000 Google employees living in Mountain View) or a convoluted scheme to expose more ads. This news article has all the details.

Ram Viswanathan of Chennailiving wants such coverage here in Chennai, crying out in frustration against the vagaries of a BSNL broadband connection. Well, maybe not in Chennai, but if you are on vacation with a laptop in Dharmasala in the foothills of the Himalayas, you may be lucky.

Reports Wired.com:

Across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet, the tech infrastructure in this high mountain village is a mess.

But a former Silicon Valley dot-commer and members of the underground security group Cult of the Dead Cow are working with local Tibetan exiles to change that using recycled hardware, solar power, open-source software and nerd ingenuity. The volunteers are building a low-cost wireless mesh network to provide cheap, reliable data and telephony to community organizations.

And the most interesting thing about this network is that more than a ‘firewall’, it needs a way to keep monkeys away from the dishes and antennas.

Footnote: Maybe the Dharmasala wireless mesh does need a ‘Firewall’. The day after the article appeared on wired.com the website of the agency setting this up was hacked, allegedly by the Chinese. (Moral: Chinese do read wired.com)