Barcelona: The most wired city in the world | Hacker News Reader

Barcelona: The most wired city in the world

fortune.com

54 pointsjordigg11 comments

"Consider for a moment the possibilities of Wi-Fi-fitted lampposts, each with its own IP address, monitoring the numbers of Facebook posts, tweets, or credit card swipes as you stroll by with your smartphone (which identifies where you are from) and withdraw cash, buy shoes, drink a soda, and visit a museum."

Can the journalist explain us how a lamppost can do that? Even assuming that the tourist is connected to the free municipal WiFi -most of them don't-, how can the council track https traffic with Facebook, or Youtube? It is not only technically "challenging" but also illegal under Spanish Law.

In my opinion, this is a long and sensationalist article to explain that Barcelona signed a big contract to build municipal network that covers all the city using Wifi and FO and that, thanks to this network, now it is really cheap and easy to deploy sensors around the city that allow Big Data applications.

Buy the way, Catalonia has the biggest Open Wifi network in the world, with more than 30.000 nodes:

http://guifi.net/node/17714/view/map

Many users of this network where pushing the councils of their towns to collaborate in the project installing public nodes in order to expand the network. Also, a lot of research has been done about protocols to manage big open networks.

The municipal network in Barcelona is not connected to Guifi.net, but I wonder if Guifi.net had somehow influenced the council of Barcelona to take this decision.

I think it is also interesting to note the hate that they thrown at the newly elected Mayor at the end of the article. But in any case, I guess that it is always good news for the citizens of a city if Fortune.com don't like their Mayor.

Regarding guide.net.... The local governments are not big supporters (except towns where the ADSL is not working).

Free or community driven projects are seen as unholy or something like that to these mafia, i mean government workers. I would not be surprised if we get a call soon that these installations are illegal because they are unfair to Telefonica or something similar./Sarcasm

Not all councils behave like mafia. It just depend witch political party is ruling the city. Actually, some local governments are quite open to backup initiatives coming from the civil society. You know, governments are there because of an election, so they are not better of worst than the people that voted them.

Why would you want the most connected city? Online security is still not a mature field, with many manufacturers completely skirting security requirements. What you are building by going completely online too much too soon is a recipe for disaster.

> Consider for a moment the possibilities of Wi-Fi-fitted lampposts, each with its own IP address

I hope they're talking about IPv6, not IPv4.

I'd assume it's a private network, why would they need public IPs?

In order to be easier to pwn!

The question, of course, is who gets access to the data.

There's an application process to access the data. The application can be found here: http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/

> Big Data CoE Barcelona is a new centre driven by Barcelona Digital Technology Centre, the Government of Catalonia, the Barcelona City Council and Oracle that will build, develop and provide tools, data sets and value-added Big Data capabilities to enable companies on defining, testing and validating Big Data models before its final implementation. The center will also offer training services for professionals looking for specialization within the field and a dissemination programme focused on showing trends and Big Data success cases to spread among businesses a new culture based on the value of the data.

[1] http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/about-big-data-coe-barcelona/

Seeing who is building this project, reading their quotes, I see more reason for concern than for rejoice.

"IDC estimates that by 2020, the Internet of Everything will monitor and manage countless activities in our lives, from the moment we awake to the moment we fall asleep, from catching the bus to filling the refrigerator, walking the dog, and watering the garden."

And you think Revelation 13:16-17 is a joke?

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