On the Configure > Advanced page there is now an option to block adult content. It’s a beta feature and uses OpenDNS – but until the Great Australian Firewall is introduced next year it’s a better-than-nothing measure to ensure legal use of your Internet connection by other people using your free wireless gateway, so it’s probably a good idea to turn it on.

Not that I’ve ever heard reports of people illegally using Meraki or other free wireless networks for illegal purposes or people getting in trouble with the law, but it’s sensible to minimise the risk.

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Blocking adult content

Post from: Free Australia Wireless

Free Australia Wireless goes to Perth for Edge of the Web

During the 3 days of the workshops, the conference and WebJam 8 we had around 450 unique users and handled 7.2 GB of traffic. One user managed 540 MB traffic on their own … which is a bit unfortunate as we did ask people to go easy on the network and even browse with images turned off, but I’m happy that even with usage like that the network still kept running. 500 unique users on any wireless or free network is already a big load – but even with that high-traffic use the network coped just fine. I used it most of the time with no worries.

We had Meraki nodes scattered throughout the venue … a couple in the foyer, three in the main auditorium (down to two on Friday as one went “missing” on Thursday) and one in 101A.

Also congratulations to @holodigm and @jodiem for winning the two Meraki Minis we gave away to whoever tweeted in the best responses to the question “Why should you win a Meraki and what would you use it for?”. Both pledged to start up free wireless mesh networks. Both of the Merakis we gave away were donated to Free Australia Wireless by Justin Kerr-Stevens.

And another big thanks to Lachlan Hardy and WebJam 8 for sponsoring Free Australia Wireless and paying for the printing of the fliers JJ designed that we gave out at the Web Directions South conference, and thanks to Nick Hodge, Peter Asquith and Gary Barber for helping me put fliers on everyone’s seats during afternoon tea on Friday before Mark Pesce’s presentation.

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Post-Web Directions South 2008

It’s funny; just a couple of days ago when I met with David Mathews we were talking about something similar but with with the rollout of TransACT a few years back and how that network and infrastructure was obsolete before the project was completed.

And we’re about to see a repeat of that. In fact, as Stil says, other countries are already rolling out networks with speeds far above what is in the spec for this National Broadband Network.

So it seems we haven’t learned any lessons from previous such projects and we’re about to waste a whole lot of money doing it again – or are we? Perhaps it’ll never come to fruition, what with a large portion of the National Broadband Network budget “Not For Publication”.

Wireless infrastructure on the other hand is far more scalable and easier to upgrade.

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National Broadband Network

A wireless mesh network here would have helped as a redundancy mechanism – although even assuming that there was a saturation of nodes in place (and as far as I know there would be lucky to be half a dozen advertised open networks) to cover that sort of area is beyond the capability of a mesh network if there were no gateways in that region and the entire mesh was running off the closest gateway nodes to the communication blacked-out area; Meraki advises no more than 10 hops off a gateway, so with 200 metre range Meraki Outdoor units you could at best cases penetrate 2km into a suburb that has no gateway nodes operational. But still – that’s better than nothing. That could have reduced the number of affected homes and businesses by 20% in this case.

Just to illustrate another benefit of wireless mesh networks.

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Communication cables cut in Sydney & wireless mesh network redundancy