Tech 3 for 5.10.2007

I read tons of tech material each day. Here are three stories I've chosen for YOU.

1) Impact of Wi-Fi is greatest for city workers, not average folks. Governing Magazine reports that we've been thinking about municipal Wi-Fi all wrong. Snippet:

Most of the chatter is about Internet access for citizens and businesses. WiFi will change the world, the tech gurus tell us, once anyone with a laptop or some newfangled handheld device can easily take Yahoo and YouTube to go. Others hype wireless as the Internet on-ramp for poor people. Statistics in Corpus Christi tell a different story. On one typical day in January, public users accessed the system just 2,288 times. Assuming that nobody logged on more than once, that’s less than one session for every 120 people. Not exactly changing the world.

Where WiFi actually does ignite life-altering change is on the government side. Corpus Christi uses wireless connections to keep building inspectors, code enforcers, police, firefighters and EMTs hooked into the office while out in the field. WiFi helps keep tabs on property such as water towers and vehicles. More telling than the current government applications, however, are the wild ideas bubbling up because the wireless Internet now makes them feasible. Those ideas aren’t always practical or affordable — that super cool remote-control crime-fighting surveillance helicopter probably won’t fly. But Corpus Christi managers are free to dream about how to use the WiFi cloud. Around city hall, the official buzz phrase for this is “cloud chasing.”

2) Artist Bill Shackelford builds his "Spamtrap."

"Spamtrap" is an interactive installation piece the prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses I have created specifically to lure in spam. I do not use these email addresses for any other communication. I post individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

Because I know that all email sent to these email addresses are spam, I have set the installation to print and then shred each email as it arrives. Simultaneously the installation is feeding spam blacklists on the web with information gathered from all the received spam (a newly added feature). This in turn helps to feed spam filtering systems across the web that are working to reduce the amount of spam we all receive.

"Spamtrap" - watch the video

3) iPhone to rock the world? ChangeWave Alliance thinks so. Snippet:

It’s not often that we say “it rocks” when analyzing a consumer device trend. But the findings of our latest ChangeWave cell phone survey invite extremes to describe the startling impact the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is having on the cellular industry.

Our survey of 3,489 Alliance members – conducted April 4-10 – reveals exceptionally high levels of excitement surround the iPhone’s upcoming release. Nearly one-in-10 respondents (9%) say they are likely to buy the new iPhone once it becomes available in June.