St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Light Poles Create Delay in Rollout of city's Wi-Fi network

Sometimes, the bloody obvious doesn't hit you until way too late in the game. For example, St. Louis wanted to roll out city-wide Wi-Fi. They thought that they had the perfect plan - put the wi-fi routers and access points on top of constructs that were already ubiquitous and had electrical connections - the streetlight system.

The only problem was…

Most St. Louis streetlights are powered by bank switches - a single bank might control 90 of them - and there's no way to get electricity to transmitters on them without leaving the lights on all day.

So, short of building a Wi-Fi connection that only worked from dusk to dawn, Wi-Fi planners in St. Louis are back to square one.

On the other hand, there are some aspects of Wi-Fi technology that are worth the frustration. For instance:

TechWorld: Scientists show-off super-fast Wi-Fi

As if scientists weren't big enough show-offs already.

Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar and other scientists at the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) have used extremely high radio frequencies to transfer very large data files.

I've tried to transfer very large data files while extremely high as well, but I usually just end up staring at my screensaver for hours…

…ahem... moving on…

The GEDC used a high frequency in the 60GHz band, and have achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15Gbit/s over a span of one metre, according to the Associated Press.

While it's unlikely to solve WAN problems, from a LAN perspective, this stuff makes it plausible that an entire workforce could be mobile and able to come together to solve problems instead of being separated by desks and glued to their stationary monitors.

Financial Times: Chinese military hacked into Pentagon

Last June, the Chinese military hacked into the Pentagon. Yes, that Pentagon. Yes, that Chinese military.

The PLA regularly probes US military networks - and the Pentagon is widely assumed to scan Chinese networks - but US officials said the penetration in June raised concerns to a new level because of fears that China had shown it could disrupt systems at critical times.

"The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system...and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale," said a former official, who said the PLA had penetrated?the?networks?of US defence companies and think-tanks.

Hackers from numerous locations in China spent several months probing the Pentagon system before overcoming its defences, according to people familiar with the matter.

BoingBoing: Quechup is rotten [Warning: Harsh Language]

Apparently, viruses can hitch a ride on social networks as well.

While you were burning / vacationing / spacing out offline this Labor Day weekend, many folks online were hit with invitations from a social networking service called Quechup that [expletives deleted] your address book, and violates user trust by spamming all your contacts.

It's just absolutely despicable behavior. Social networks are only as good as the member community - by spamming in this manner, Quechup has shot itself in the foot. Unless it was nothing more than an e-mail harvesting spam operation - in that case, it's done it's job.