Aha! ManchesterWireless

This entry rambles a bit.

For me there’s always a weird transition period between the externally imposed regularity of the semester and the relative freedom of the periods between semesters. It takes me a bit of time to gear up for getting things done on my own time clock, rather than according to the rhythms of teaching and meetings.

I’ve become conscious of this in part because of the “reading” section of my blog, located on the right-hand side of the main index page. During the semester I could update this section every week because I was reading right along with my students in all three classes: a new Shakespeare play, a new novel, a new collection of essays. Each week we were all just tripping right along, and I could feel oh-so-smart by displaying to the blog-reading world (or the half-dozen or so of you who stop by, anyway) just how efficient and well-read I was.

However, as of this posting, the “reading” section is populated by Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins – a book I’m supposed to have been reading for weeks now to discuss with friends but which, for some reason, keeps escaping my attention – and two comic book titles that I buy every month. Now, Powers and Love and Rockets are great reads, but when they are the only things on the list that I’m actually currently reading, it’s time to get a little concerned, don’t you think?

But, to be honest, I’m reading a lot more than this. We get the New Yorker and Wired, and I look over the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Kansas City Star online. I just started Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, but decided that a novel that begins with the description of how an assistant professor screws up his chances for tenure just wasn’t what I need right now.

And what about the immediate future? Soon enough, as I know you probably know, since I keep writing about it, I’ll be reading manuscript letters and diaries of eighteenth-century Methodists.

Later in the summer, I would like to read two books by Slavoj Zizek, whose recent work has taken a turn towards examining Christianity: The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? and On Belief. Full disclosure: I’m not a Christian, but I do study Christianity as part of my work. And I find Zizek to be fascinating, if frustrating.

Before fall semester begins, I would also like to read the eight or so novels I plan to assign in my eighteenth-century novel course.

Capturing all of this reading, partial reading, would-be reading and reading-to-be-done in a simple list on the side of my blog is pretty much impossible, however.

Friday I put new strings on the guitar, and this afternoon I’ve been rehearsing “Happy Birthday” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Can you guess where I’m going later?

No Political Fallout for Bush on Weapons (washingtonpost.com)

Disarming Saddam Hussein of his “weapons of mass destruction” was the main justification the Bush administration used both at home and abroad for attacking Iraq. But while other countries that opposed the U.S. military action claim they are vindicated by the failure so far to find those weapons, Americans — even some of Bush’s political opponents — seem content with the low-casualty victory and believe the discoveries of mass graves and other Hussein atrocities justify the war.

*sigh*

How about this for the next paragraph: “When asked whether the United States would undertake a human rights program to address the countless atrocities committed in other, non-oil-producing countries around the world, these American just shook their heads in disgust before saying, ‘Why do you hate America so much?'”

New media are understood in part via the metaphorical logic of the print-based office. “Desktops,” “documents,” “files,” “folders,” and “recycling bins” are among the terms used to describe and explain how the tools of information technology manipulate the ones and zeros that make up electronic data, demonstrating how new technologies are often conceived in terms of the old, and suggesting that our concept of information is defined by print.

Other popular terms in common use are taken from outside the logic of print–“screen,” “mouse,” “web,” “virus,” for example–a vocabulary which suggests that the print-based metaphor is breaking down, and the mixed-metaphorical nature of these terms also demonstrates that a coherent new way of thinking about information has not completely coalesced.

I’ve been thinking about issues like these because I recently figured out how to get my wireless card working with my laptop (it’s been a busy year). I can sit in my office and use the signal from the AirPort in Jeff’s office next door, and I know Jeff is fine with my doing so because we’ve talked about it. But what about signals I might pick up from other sources? Is using them legal? Is it ethical? I started looking online for information and discussion.

At warchalking.org I came across this analogy:

A business location has an umbrella in front of their building. It is placed there so that their employees and customers can get out of the rain or sun. Occasionally passerbys will use the umbrella. The business owner really doesn’t mind because it does nothing to diminish the value of their umbrella or their business as a whole. If crowds of people start hanging out under the umbrella making it so the employees or customers cannot use it, the business can take away the umbrella or place a little fence around it.

In response, someone else proposed the analogy of a foyer in an apartment building:

The foyer exists so residents and their guests don’t have to stand outside and wait. Every now and then, a homeless person will take up residence in that foyer, and if allowed to stay, the word gets out among the local homeless community that it’s a good place for shelter … The builders didn’t put that shelter there for them, nor do residents want to step over them every time they enter the building. Plain and simple, they are tresspassing.

As I understand it, if you have a wireless router, you can adjust it so that the signal is only sent to authorized computers. However, most routers are shipped with a default setting that does not restrict which devices can receive the signal. Some people never change the setting and, well, that’s why we have war driving.

One possible argument: “You have set your wireless router such that anyone can use your wifi signal; that’s implicitly inviting anyone to use it.” And a possible counter-argument: “If I don’t lock the front door to my house, it’s not an invitation for you to come in, sit on the couch, and read my newspaper.”

The problem with the architectural analogies is that (if I understand the technology correctly) the wireless card in the computer is a passive recipient of a signal actively sent out by the wireless access point. A user does not have to “break into” a network in order to make use of the signal; rather the unsecured signal is being broadcast out to any and all users. You’re not invading their space; arguably, they are invading yours.

If a business is located near a coffee shop, and their signal happens to be broadcast into that shop, on what grounds could they object to patrons of the coffee shop tapping into that signal? You sit down to drink your coffee, turn on your laptop to get some work done and *boink!* you discover you have a signal. Cool! Let’s email. You’re not camped out near the office with the goal of exploiting their internet access. Instead, they are the ones flooding nearby spaces with their wifi signal; certainly they can’t claim authority over all space within broadcast range of their access point. “Don’t turn on your laptop! If you do, disable your wireless card!”

So what works as a analogy? If a stranger walks into my home through an unlocked front door and reads my newspaper, I think that’s clearly wrong. But if I leave the newspaper in the coffee shop, I shouldn’t be upset (or even surprised) to learn that others have chosen to read it. No one is trying to deny me the right to read the paper, but since it was just sitting there they decided they’d read it, too. If I don’t want someone else to read it, I shouldn’t leave it in the coffee shop.

In the first draft of this post I wrote “eats my chips” for “reads my newspaper,” but I realized that after someone eats your chips, you don’t have any chips. By contrast, after someone uses your Internet access, you still have Internet access, so the newspaper seemed like a better analogy. But now that I think about it a newspaper doesn’t have much value, and its unauthorized use would not represent a great breach of etiquette.

Hmmm. Have a better suggestion?