[LINK] Google's WiFi bungle

Stilgherrian stil at stilgherrian.com
Tue May 18 15:01:17 AEST 2010


Good God, I'm immediately agreeing with Craig Sanders. ;) But yes this is such a beat-up. People broadcast stuff on open channels, Google scooped it up while doing something else, Google realised they'd scooped it up, then deleted it, then went public to say so and apologised. Google are being the Good Guys here.

Stil


On 18/05/2010, at 2:49 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 11:31:07AM +1000, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>> But - here's where I need a technologist to confirm my understanding - 
>> changing channels is one of those things WiFi does. Isn't "frequency 
>> hopping spread spectrum" in the definition?
> 
> yep.
> 
>> So what I suspect is the "changing channels five times a second" is just 
>> blowing smoke to create a general fog to confuse the media. Or am I 
>> horribly mistaken?
> 
> probably.
> 
> but then the whole issue's a stupid beat-up anyway.
> 
> google collected publicly available data that people were broadcasting
> for anyone to see. so what? big deal.
> 
> the technically-correct fix is for the morons who had/have unsecured
> & unencrypted wifi access points to actually get off their arses and
> secure them.
> 
> but once the media have sensationalised the hell out of a bullshit
> story, the solution is PR, not tech.
> 
> craig
> 
> -- 
> craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
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