To Protect and Serve: Open WiFi
I had to go to the airport early this morning and on the way back I thought I’d swing by the Apple Store in Emeryville at an hour well before anything should have been open, just to make sure that last night’s release of their new Operating System, Tiger, wasn’t part of some 24-hour round-the-clock madness.
As I drove down the strangely empty road separating the Bay Street shops I saw that the only car was a police car sitting right in front of the Apple Store. I wondered if Tiger was so popular that it required 24-hour police protection from lunatic Mac-addicts who missed their chance to buy Tiger last night before closing.
But then I saw that the police officer had what could only be an iBook propped up on his steering wheel and he was intently staring at the screen and typing away.
“HE’S STEALING FREE WIFI!” I internally exclaimed.
It makes sense that Apple would set up a wireless base station so that all their display computers could be on the net, and it seems likely it would leak out to that parking spot directly in front of the store. The surprise was that the Apple Store is either running wide open and the cop figured out that he had found something better than free donuts, or the Apple Store, hoping for a little police goodwill, could have added his MAC address or given him the WEP key.
In a world where law enforcement believes its ok to share open WiFi spots, it’s hard for the rest of us to believe otherwise.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.