The Story Behind "Free Public WiFi" - It's Not
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That is so wild. It's like the ad-hoc wifi equivalent of a chain letter.
Edit: Thinking about it, it's even crazier... Because the bug only happens when there aren't any available networks, it springs up in situations when there are a lot of people looking for wireless, but there isn't any— on buses, conferences, etc. The exact sort of situations where people are most likely to try out "Free Public WiFi", so the virus is more likely to propagate.
Furthermore, the name is important. In order for it to become a widespread phenomenon, it has to be a name a lot of people will click on. But we can imagine that a lot of people have set up ad-hoc networks with different names that wound up being temporarily duplicated by the bug. Some of those with attractive names may have caused further duplication before finally disappearing. The more attractive the name, the more likely it is to be duplicated before being overwritten. In effect, the name "Free Public WiFi" has been selected for.
I'm calling it: This is the first (global?) distributed wireless network that evolved on its own. Unfortunately, evolution doesn't require that it actually be useful to people :P
Not really. It's emergent behavior in a complex system. You have a lot of entities (in this case, unpatched Windows XP SP2 and below systems), and a set of very simple local rules (if (winxp and no wifi) then create last adhoc network, if (human and see "free public wifi") then click link).
The fascinating behavior that emerges from the interplay of these local rules is the global "virus" if you will. It's a fascinating area of research, and even aside from the inflated egos of some physicists in the area, I'm glad I'm studying the field.
Read Duncan Watts' book "Six degrees" for a decent popsci introduction to the field (you might have to skip some self-aggrandizing of physics as the Savior of Intellectual Thought though).
Edit: cellular automata are a more recognizable CS example of this.
The rules of the buggy system mean that any ad-hoc network can be replicated if a user connects to it. That creates selective pressure on the name of ad-hoc networks in that convincing more users to click on them causes further replication.
So we have a (somewhat) self-replicating entity, with variation, and a selective process applied to that variation. Sounds like evolution to me.
(Of course the names are originally made by people; but if we assume that ad-hoc networks aren't named with the intention of creating a self-replicating pattern, they're effectively random from the perspective of the ecosystem. The success of "Free Public WiFi" is a product of selection, not human design.)
Without selective pressure (i.e., "survival of the fittest") you can still have evolution via drift, the founder effect, etc. Drift is a very important source of evolution in a lot of situations (during my PhD I studied how a source of seeming drift in the coding regions of genes was actually caused by selective pressure in some cases).
Without mutation a population can still evolve, too - for example, if a disease struck and there was no mutation, an allele that protected against the disease would quickly dominate the population. This is a much more pedantic thing to point out (on my part), though, since every stretch of every organism's DNA mutates. The different mutation rates of viruses, bacteria, and humans due to replication errors (and the resulting effect on evolution) is a pretty fascinating topic, though.
> That creates selective pressure on the name of ad-hoc networks in that convincing more users to click on them causes further replication.
I was thinking in a more formal mathematical sense. You can write a fairly short agent-based model (for example) to simulate the spread of "Free Public Wifi" and look for conditions where it remains suspended in the population. The analogy is closer to a virus than evolution.
But hey, I didn't mean to imply that what you were saying was wrong or --gasp-- a bad analogy in anyway, and I warned you that this was going to get pedantic. :)
To put it another way: I wonder if "Free Public Wifi" was the surviving ad-hoc phantom in countries where the primary language isn't English.
Even cooler is if you did manage to find a Madagascar that hadn't developed any widespread variant of its own either, you'd have the chance to design and introduce it. It'd be a neat social hack.
If this was the case, wouldn't we see all manner of oddly named hotspots at airport locations, and wouldn't they also propagate as people try to connect to them?
I suspect this story may have been "simplified" to the point where the interesting details have been lost.
It's actually surprising to see it here now. I was expecting to see a [2007] tacked on to it.
Project idea: automatically extract HN evergreens :-)
as for other locations, get ready for the subway system if you didn't catch it before... http://mashable.com/2010/07/30/nyc-wireless-subway/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_netw...
XP simply remembers the last ad-hoc network you connected to, to be used when there are no actual APs around. As a blindingly obvious differentiation, ad-hoc networks have a different icon and say "computer-to-computer network".
Back when Windows XP was introduced, ad-hoc was extremely useful as lots of places didn't have wireless internet access. My friends and I often used it to swap files or play network games.
If anything I would call this an unintended phenomenon of people just clicking something and hoping it worked. The network does not spread because of Windows, it spreads because people select an ad-hoc network without knowing what is.
Why we as a society think its totally great to be completely ignorant and reckless with our computers, I'll never understand.
Maybe some of them were.