work in progress

Free Public WiFi

jstn:

Have you seen this wireless network? I see it *everywhere*, and it’s so suspicious because it’s always ad-hoc (meaning broadcasting from a computer rather than a regular access point). I imagined for a long time it was part of a virus; it waits for someone to connect, redirects to a page that exploits some hole in Internet Explorer, scrapes your hard disk and sends your social security number to Russia, sets itself up as “Free Public WiFi”, repeat.

After seeing it for the thousandth time at the train station Philadelphia yesterday I decided to look it up. Turns out it’s not a virus (at least not in the usual sense) but rather an interesting fuckup on Microsoft’s part, with viral consequences.

Basically, if Windows can’t connect to a preferred network that happens to be ad-hoc it creates the network itself with the same name. At some point, somebody was connected to a real ad-hoc network called “Free Public WiFi”. They went to another location where it didn’t exist, their laptop helpfully recreated the network, more people connected to it (and probably disconnected when it didn’t work), those people carried it with them somewhere else, and the cycle has been repeating ever since.

Word of the Day: Portmanteau

While looking up the wiki-definition of Bookmarklet I came across this fun-to-pronounce one.

from Wikipedia:

A portmanteau is used broadly to mean a blend of two (or more) words.
The usage of the word ‘portmanteau’ in this sense first appeared in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky:

• ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’… You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word”
• ‘Mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau … for you)”.