Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them
in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light
up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they've all got a
manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color -- whatever
shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.

"I've got a couple thousand of these back home, but they're selling
briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and
we'll snag a couple hundred more."

Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches
on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the
dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he
went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and
assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to
him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he
was grinding underfoot.

Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that
everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't want
them to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckies
with a hammer before they pitch 'em out."

He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and
some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the
handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his
palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.

Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'd
transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a
dozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt
assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies
and other garbage pickers.

As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing a
shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking *morons* --
they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten
bucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like raccoons in the
trash, chasing after nickel deposits."

"But then what would you pick?"

Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you *see*? There's a hundred
times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had
a squint of ambition, we could *double* the amount we save from the
trash."

"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant it
as a compliment. After all, wasn't *he* an extraordinary person, too?

#

Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and
revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with
confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop
that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.

He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba
laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and
only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in
its LCD.

He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly
used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year's
software. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that the
picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but
Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old
dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.

They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of
sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan
wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but
so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.

"How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?" Kurt said. "I
mean, all this work, and we've hardly gotten four or five square blocks
covered."

"Buck up," Alan said. "We could spend another two years just helping
people in the Market use what we've installed, and it would still be
productive." Kurt's mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. "Not that
I'm proposing that we do that. I just mean there's plenty of good that's
been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical
mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can't
fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work."

"So what do we get them to do?"

"It's a good question. There's something I saw online the other day I
wanted to show you. Why don't we go home and get connected?"

"There's still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home
anyway -- I know a place."

They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy
monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets
had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage
showed no signs of use.

Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from
the others and took the laptop from under the Buick's seat, plugging it
into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.

"There's an open network here," Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless
card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.

"How the hell did you find that?" Alan said, looking at the darkened
window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the
back an aboveground pool.

Kurt laughed. "These 'security consultants'" -- he made little quotes
with his fingers -- "wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the
city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open
access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of
those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving
themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections
available to baby-eating terrorists.

"One of the access points they identified was *mine*, for chrissakes,
and mine was open because I'm a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I'm
an ignorant 'consumer' who doesn't know any better, and that got me to
thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running
open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I *really* was trying
to remember who'd played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew
that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler,
an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into
range of, and a GPS attachment that I'd dived that could interface with
the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just
belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around
until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from
the street.

"So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I
usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some
residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in
the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice
sofas and things.

"When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access
points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial
strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with
the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the
name of the network was 'ParasiteNet.'"

Alan said, "Huh?" because ParasiteNet was Kurt's name for his wireless
project, though they hadn't used it much since Alan got involved and
they'd gotten halfway legit. But still.

"Yeah," Kurt said. "That's what I said -- huh? So I googled ParasiteNet
to see what I could find, and I found an old message I'd posted to
toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of
manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and
this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his
network after it.

"So I figger: This guy *wants* to share packets with me, for sure, and
so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online."

"You've never met him, huh?"

"Never. I'm always out here at two a.m. or so, and there's never a light
on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the
bell and say hello. Never got to it."

Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.

"He's got a shitkicking net connection, though -- tell you what. Feels
like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need
a browser, right?"

Alan shook his head. "You know, I can't even remember what it was I
wanted to show you. There's some kind of idea kicking at me now,
though..."

Kurt shifted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and the
antenna. "What's up?"

"Let's do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more
dumpsters you want to show me?"

"Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years."

#

It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of the
networks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop up
on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun
go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.

Alan didn't even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it
immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish
drive-time on the night-dark streets.

"Here's the thing," Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta
Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the
smallest hours of the morning. "I started off thinking, well, the cell
companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the
whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and
my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and
grassroots and democratic."

"Right," Alan said. "I was just thinking of that. What could be more
democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points
and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?"

"Yeah," Kurt said.

"Sure, you won't get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by
bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play
around with hardware. And convincing the people who *already* know why
WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers
who've never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their
walls."

"Right," Kurt said, getting more excited. "Right! I mean, it's just ego,
right? Why do we need to *control* the network?" He spun around on his
cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. "Gimme some apple
pie, please," he said. "This is the best part: it's going to violate the
hell out of everyone's contracts with their ISPs -- they sell you an
all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they'll cut
off your service if you're too hungry. Well, fuck that! It's not just
community networking, it'll be civil disobedience against shitty
service-provider terms of service!"

There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up
from