The Butt Ugly Weblog

Set up your own ~WiFi hotspot

Become your own ~WiFi (aka WLAN, aka IEEE 802.11) hotspot provider! PublicIP needs you just to pop in a CD and connect a couple of wires... And even the computer you need needs to have a Pentium CPU and a whopping 128 MB of memory, so any old hog will do. You can, if you want, have user registration, firewall filtering, and content filtering. It also firewalls people out of your private network, so you can just use your regular connection. And it's all open source...

Seriously: projects like these make it a lot easier for public places (cafes, libraries, museums, hotels) to set up a secure and safe wireless internet connection. Little money is needed for the setup, and it provides quite a lot of value to the customers. Quite a lot of people are buying laptops these days, so it's no longer a geek-only exclusive domain.

(Thanks to Anne S for the tip.)