Payphones, those relics of the pre-cellphone era, may just get a new lease on life in New York. The city is testing a pilot program in which it installs free Wi-Fi on select payphone kiosks. The hotspots are initially coming to ten payphones in three of the boroughs and will be open to the public to access for free.
You can see a list of sites here. New York is already flush with a lot of great free Wi-Fi options. The city has been installing more Wi-Fi at schools, libraries and senior centers. And providers like Towerstream are providing sponsored Wi-Fi for users who are willing to view a selection of daily deals. Here in Santa Fe, we are fortunate to have beaucoup free wifi sources. Practically a requirement for any coffee shop that wants regular clientele.
Still, the overriding question is always access and availability. We can grump about charges when we have sufficient. But now that practically everyone has a smartphone or two , what's to become of all those useless, ancient relics of a time when the landline was king? New York City has an idea: Turn those unused payphones into free wifi hotspots. According to the city's official Tumblr page , this is a pilot program that is starting with ten hotspots, but will eventually spread to all five boroughs.
Seven of the wifi locations are in Manhattan, but Astoria in Queens and Brooklyn Heights will get trial locations, as well. The free wifi locations will have a range of about feet, a feat it owes to military-grade antennas. Users won't have to pay for the service, but they will have to click through a local tourism advertisement to start surfing the web. We're glad New York is employing such a novel way to provide free wifi, and we're especially glad they're not exploiting the homeless to do it, like a controversial plan executed at the SXSW conference.
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca. More from Tecca :. How to make the most of airplane wifi. Japan researchers make a major wifi speed breakthrough. The nation's first public super wifi network goes live.
Krot told the man. Angela Simmons caught fans by surprise on Jan. In the Instagram post, the year-old […]. Republican Sen. Yes, fast, free internet access can be manna from digital heaven — but only if you keep your wits about you. In addition, free hotspots often rely on a login page, rather tellingly known as a captive portal , where you have to first sign up for the service, even if your plan once online is to hop onto your own Virtual Private Network VPN to keep your network traffic secure.
Basically, a VPN encrypts all your network data before it leaves your phone or laptop, sending the scrambled stream of data back to your own network and decrypting it there before it gets sent to the internet.
But that was done over an unencrypted HTTP connection, so anyone in the vicinity could sniff those logins and build up a guest list. And Paul reported being caught out by a captive portal again — ironically while we were discussing this very article.
He was in a historic building in which mobile network penetration was very poor, but there was a surprisingly generous free Wi-Fi service to make up for it, offering a whopping 40GB of free data each month. In other words, your name, address, email birthday and more will almost certainly end up being shared around. Which brings us back to LinkNYC: as The Verge noted, there was a bit of a ruckus when it was found that one of the companies involved in the hubs, Titan, had implanted Bluetooth beacons in the test hubs.
This is technology that potentially could have been used not only to push ads, but also to track people in the street by logging the time they passed each Bluetooth beacon, and recording details about their device.
Hopefully, those forthcoming details will help us to figure out what kind of risks users might face with LinkNYC. During that time, even if you are careful what you do inside your browser, background apps on your phone or laptop may give away information about you, your device, the settings on your device, and more.
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