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Google Camera Helps Nab Alleged Tree Killers
Forget about all of those ubiquitous police surveillance cameras in your city: the new sheriff in town is that shifty Google Maps camera wheeling through your neighborhood. Recently, a property owner in Canada was charged with illegal removal of trees after a Google camera helped capture the evidence, according to CanWest News Service. Last May in Vancouver, Margaret Burnyeat allegedly hired a company to remove 23 cedar, cypress and evergreen trees from two adjacent lots she owned.
Continue reading »Week in tech: getting fast fiber in your town, quantum gravity, Mozilla Raindrop
Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own . ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it’s amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.
Continue reading »First white space broadband deployment in small Virginia town
The nation’s first wireless broadband network operating in unused TV channel ” white spaces ” is now live in an unlikely spot—Claudville, Virginia. Claudville is a small place—only 20,000 people live in the entire county, and only 900 in Claudville proper—and its Blue Ridge Mountain terrain has made Internet access hard to come by. Combine that with a countywide per capita income of $15,574 and its not hard to see why the big ISPs haven’t rushed to Claudville.
Continue reading »Monticello, MN beats the phone company; Internet a "utility"
The local telephone company in an 11,000-person Minnesota town objected when the town decided to lay its own fiber optic network. The telco filed a lawsuit, and then suddenly rolled out its own fiber network while the case was tied up in courts. Today, a state appeals court ruled in the city’s favor (PDF); Internet access was certainly a “utility,” the court said, and the city was well within its rights to finance the project as it did.
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