Sharing broadband via a wireless network with your next door neighbours or even your whole apartment block is the latest social collaboration phenomenon in distributed computing. It can reduce your costs, increase your speed and enhance your download capacity. But be careful to enable your personal firewall and wireless encryption so that only those with the pin can use it and remember to disable file sharing.

Its not even illegal - but check your service providers contract.

There are even some companies who will set the whole thing up for you such as www.myzones.com.

Others such as www.Fon.com will allow you free wifi whilst travelling on the understanding that you contribute your capacity into a shared pool (a bit like how skype allows you to make free calls).

Be careful if your neighbours decide to move house as the provider will chase whoevers name is on the bottom of contact for all the money.

For an excellent article which provides full details see How the wi-fi revolution could cut your bill which suggests the following checklist of key points in shared broadbanding:

1. Install a personal firewall
2. Look into consumer VPN services
3. Disable Automatic log on
4. Secure personal details
5. Turn off file and print-sharing on your computer
6. Change the default service set identifier (SSID)
7. Disable SSID broadcast
8. Change the default password needed to access a wireless device
9. Enable Mac address filtering

Bioteams Books Reviews

Could cell phones destroy civilisation

July 20, 2006 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

"Cell", the new novel by horror writer Stephen King, paints an all too plausible scenario where our addiction to cell phones enables a malicious virus to be pulsed to every phone in the world turning all who take the call into a flock of murderously mad zombies.

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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