I had a comment from Steve Robertson dropped on my WPA cracked entry. He's running a very interesting service, a public radius server. I've though about running an open wireless network before, I have the infrastructure (well the bunch of cables, switches and firewalls, calling the cable mess infrastructure is being kind) to isolate a public access point from the rest of my network and to throttle the bandwidth and control easily abused protocols like SMTP. I've even thought about limiting outgoing traffic to HTTP(S) and the common IM programs but the concern has always been abuse. You don't know who will connect or what they will do, be it use it nicely or spam, hack and download illegal material. radiuz solves this to some extent by offering their database as an authenication method. Users must use a pre-registered username and password so you can log who logged on and report that information if they do something dodgy. Even better is the community aspect. If you are a simple user you must be specifically allowed to attack to each access point that is part of the radiuz network. If you open an access point and register it with radiuz you can roam at will on any other radiuz access point. Nice idea. It needs more publicity.

Now I just need to get a suitable access point as my WG602 doesn't support radius authenication. In a email conversation Steve suggested the Linksys WRT54G, with one of the open source firmwares that allow decent logging.