Maria Cerase

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Are you in my same situation? A situation in which your fixed cable connection is broken and your landlord doesn’t want to pay for repair? A situation in which you subscribed for mobile connection, but it is way too slow for your surfing habits? A situation in which when you sniff some open wi-fi network you bless this wise person for doing it?

If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, you really are in my very same situation. Open wi-fi network owners can be wise and generous at the same time. In a world where wi-fi network connection is essential to a growing number of devices and applications imagine what wonderful reality it would be if every private network became open. Keeping an open access wi-fi network is on one hand a gesture of politeness, on the other hand it may be dangerous for one’s own security.

What’s the compromise, then? Is there a compromise?

The answer is yes. Me myself I am going to open my own wireless network (the one of my parents’ home) by updating my router with the dd-wrt linux based firmware and finally do it. By doing this upgrade, anyone can actually build two wireless connections:

• A virtual one, allowing only for certain kinds of traffic (HTTP, IM, POP3, SMTP, FTP, SSH);
• And a normal one, encription protected, from which you can do whatever you use to do.

How many times did you bless those neighbours of yours who kept their networks open? I suppose many of you did, and if my suggestion is widely applied, many others will do it. Checking the e-mail and doing the essential things on the internet have become vital activities to many people, for professional and recreational purposes. The take away message is:

OPEN YOUR WIRELESS NETWORK, FOR YOURS YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S GRATITUDE WILL BE.

In the meantime I’ll start warchalking wherever possible.

Inspired by www.stefanotesti.it/p/562

Paraphrasing Massimo D’Azeglio who said “We made Italy, now we need to make italians”, I can say “Europe is made, now it is time to make Europeans”. Since 1987 the Erasmus project is an answer. Even if I haven’t taken part in this project I really think it’s a great way to create what the future European citizens will be. Young students traveling and studying through-out Europe meet fellow European students and make friends. Boundaries and prejudices fall apart and open-minded people get born to make a new category of students and citizens. Here is a nice interview giving you the chance to see what an important role Erasmus is playing in making the Europeans.

Today’s world is extremely informative. You can search for things you wish to know more about as fast as the wink of an eye. Someone would call this information galore, someone else would call it: information overflow. Information is abundant, most of the times pertinent to our research intentions, and most importantly, it is overwhelming. Gathering and embedding information, being it a new recipe, or what you didn’t know about islam, is extremely time consuming. Enriching, but time consuming. Fundamental to one’s culture, but mostly passive. So, how can anyone make good use of all the information that has been gathered? How can we turn ourselves from readers to inspired writers and thinkers?

It is simple: by taking a step back from the desk and step out for a walk in the park. The constant flow of information is vital nourishment to new ideas and solutions, but it also represents a very disturbing noise source. Only by turning off the pc, or taking some silence time for myself, I really experience how good all the things I have been reading and exploring can be. So silence, or at least long breaks, are optimal places in time and space for new ideas to get born, thanks to our skillful and fast internet surfing.