Steve's Blog

THE CSIRO has won another round in its lengthy battle in the US to collect millions of dollars in royalties for its 1996-patented Wireless LAN technology.

Last Friday, a US federal court granted the science agency’s application for an injunction to stop the Buffalo group of companies from infringing the CSIRO patent in the US.

The injunction prevents the sale of products using CSIRO-patented technology until a license is negotiated.

Hopefully this should see the start of the CSIRO starting to get some royalties for patents used in 802.11a/g based equipment that were researched and developed at CSIRO.

I decided to start doing some long overdue work on MWRP today. For those that don’t know, MWRP (Short for Melbourne Wireless Router Project) is a package I started writing a while ago to act as a captive portal on a wireless access point. What happens is that someone associates with your access point, it won’t let them onto the net unless they authenticate (or you’ve specifically let them). This allows us to offer free internet access to Melbourne Wireless members (using the Melbourne Wireless server as an authenticaion back end).

So after re-writing the authentication backend twice, and hammering out in the low to mid double digits worth of bugs, it’s all available for everyone to consume . You can grab the code from the webcvs, or the package or the source code from the web site. More information on what I’ve just said above is on the Melbourne Wireless wiki page. And of course there’s the instructions.

Oh, and It looks like a german wireless group have extended on some of what MWRP does and tailored it for their group. Good stuff guys! and thanks for the credit

I’ve had this Orinoco 802.11b PCMCIA card lying around here for a while. It died when upgrading the firmware on it in a Mac when the card was removed too soon. So, I decided to do what all good geeks do when something dies. You rip it apart.

A lot of people have been asking me about the Class License that regulates 2.4Ghz and 5 Ghz WiFi equipment. After looking at the new ACMA web site, I managed to find the PDF version of the actual class license. There is also an explanatory statement.

After the presentation at Melbourne Wireless’ monthly meeting, I have noticed a few updates with OpenWRT. It seems the latest version is actually code named White Russian. As normal, there are both the prebuilt binaries and source code available.

If you wish to know more about the captive portal setup I showed off at the meeting, contact me with your questions.