Council is looking at blanketing downtown with WiFi. I’d go with a mesh network—it’s cheaper, and my tests downtown show that it’ll work just fine. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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How do they stop people from doing things like downloading bittorrents and the like.
why should they? I don’t see any of the coffee shops here blocking particular kinds of traffic.
There are a couple of ways to do it, if you’re gonna. The first, and probably best, is throttling the bandwidth available to any single client to some reasonable fraction of the total bandwidth. So if the whole of downtown is on a 1.5Mbps connection, perhaps any single client can use no more than a sustained rate of maybe 10% of that, or 152kbps (19Kbps). Bandwidth throttling can be quite a bit more complex than that, but you get the idea. The second way is through port filtering. Simply block any outgoing traffic on ports for purposes other than mail (POP/IMAP/SMTP), web (HTTP/HTTPS) or IM (XMPP/AIM). But I’m not sure that’s necessary if bandwidth is being throttled—as Chad points out, there’s probably no need.
Internet telephony and Halo are both great, but neither high-bandwidth technologies are a great use of a new public commons that’s on probation. :)
Who’s paying the internet provider and how much?
I wonder how long it will be before all new laptops sold will have some sort of wireless adaptor that uses a cell phone signal as a wireless internet source.
It’s already being done. The catch is that mobile phone signals offer some mighty weak signals compared to WiFi.