A Wi-Fi/VoIP Phone Booth In the Burning Man Desert

Brad Templeton writes "I, (of EFF/ClariNet/rec.humor.funny) along with Brent Chapman (Majordomo/Building Internet Firewalls) and the satellite dish of John Gilmore (EFF/Cygnus/Cypherpunks/etc.) put together an engaging hack -- a battery-powered free phone booth using 802.11, VoIP and a satellite IP uplink. This was placed in the desert at the Burning Man arts festival deep in the remote Nevada Black Rock playa, exactly where you wouldn't expect a working phone booth to be. With cheap VoIP people were able to call all over the world. The reactions of people to such incongruous technology were great fun and emotional as well. There's a page about the phone including details of building it and live experiences including totally non-gratuitous photos of naked people using technology. (There, that ought to stress-test my new server!)"

Google Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:pj83shgh248J:ww w.templetons.com/pq/playa.html+&hl=en&client=firef ox-a/ [66.102.7.104]

Re:Do the Math

[Janek Kozicki]

his server is probably fine, it's just the connection that has problems....

Re:Cool

[WiPEOUT]

Just don't overlook that this story is just that... fiction.

Re:Emotional reactions to technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm admit that knowledge of linguistics is lacking in most CS programs, I think your rant is more of an emotional reaction than anything in the article. Programming is generally building mathematical structures in your mind. Which is why most CS departments are crowded with the math nerds you are discussing. For several areas of AI though you need indepth knowledge of both languages and math, but it is easier to fake the language than the math. And those skilled at languages become lawyers, not artsy types. Those are two different groups of people you are lumping together.

And last time I checked, good pickup lines are less effective than an "in" outfit or a buff body. And if you want to go to Burning Man to see a phone booth you are seriously missing the point of Burning Man. Hint: it is to see things, things that aren't really there but the drugs add for you.

non-naked burning man phone pics

[jcdill]

Here is a link for those of you who want to see the phone [onlinehome.us] and don't mind that these particular photos show people wearing clothes. (I'm curious how this website stands up to being slashdotted. :-)

jc

Re:Emotional reactions to technology?

[btempleton]

Actually, a lot of Burning Man is about the marriage of art and technology. There's no fear of tech, and it's proof that there are lots of people who do combine technology and art. That's part of why I go. I do too many projects at Burning Man. Some are pure tech as art (like the phone.) Some are a mixture like digital photography. One I did this year was a star map, which while I used Photoshop to build it, was really 99% graphic arts. And many others are like this.

Re:cool idea

[pixel.jonah]

I think your estimation is 1/2 right: unlike say the rainbow gathering - the BM crowd is quite tech heavy - Space battle ships built on ram 3500 trucks with turreted fire cannons? giant 16' solar (and battery) powered tricycles? Extremly powerful lasers? yeah - some pretty cool s**t out there!

Re:No solar power?

[btempleton]

There was some mention as I recall about debating solar powering it. Part of the mystique of it was to look like a phone booth sticking out of the desert, yet with no wires, no power going into it. (Alas, we did have to expose a small 802.11 antenna.)

So a solar panel could have been added but it would have been out of place on the image I wanted to create. Indeed, one way to do the panel would be just a bit more powerful than the phone needed, so to recharge the battery a bit, and then just die when the battery ran out, and start again at dawn.

A traditional (superman) booth could have a panel on the roof that nobody would see, though a horizontal panel is not as efficient as one tilted to the latitude.

Re:how did they get the bandwidth to work???

[btempleton]

It's a Tachyon dish, 2 megabits down, 512k up. The latency is annoying, but you can work around it if the parties know not to speak on top of one another.

Re:No solar power?

[Spy Hunter]

They already make those [westcoastroads.com]. They're called "call boxes" and they are placed every mile or so along many California freeways outside of cities, in case you get stranded. Pretty neat actually, though with cellphones being so common now they're sorta useless, and I'll bet they cost a lot of money that California shouldn't have spent.

Re:I wouldn't call that a phone "booth"

[btempleton]

Technically it's called a kiosk today, but most people still call it a phone booth. I wanted a real booth, but couldn't find one cheap and locally when I was hunting, so Brent bought the pedestal and kiosk.

Re:Lucky people.

[Anonymous Coward]

We hope you enjoy the booth, which will start its life at 4:44 and Mercury but will move a couple of times. However, it also has a phone number 213 634 1441 (during the event only, please,) which outsiders can call and it will ring.

Has anyone called it yet?

Naked folks at Burning Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

...are mostly old fat, hairy men... burned out acid-head hippies from California who should have quit exposing themselves in public at least four or five decades ago.

Re:Results of new server stress-test:

[grozzie2]

Lots of folks are under the mistaken impression that a /. attack takes out servers. It rarely does that. What it does do, is totally flood the incoming/outgoing network pipe. If your server is on the far side of a t-1 or equivalent connection, the connection doesn't stand a chance, and the episode ends up being just like a distributed syn flood, all the incoming connections, but not enough bandwidth to deliver the responses. *nix boxes tend to survive fine, some flavours of windows boxes will do the bsod in this case, tcpip stack blows buffers in ring0 driver code. OTOH, if you are sitting in a data center with a 100 mbit connection to the upstream router, which has gigabit feeds to the internet, you should have no problem withstanding the onslaught of the /. crowd.

I will admit, on a new server, this is a pretty slick trick to stress test the whole system. Just suggest nudie pics available to the /. crowd, sit back, and watch to see if the upstream routers can deal with the loads. It's a far better way to see if your upstream providers have problems than sitting back and waiting till there's real business/money on the line. I've got a new load balanced cluster going live for a client in a couple weeks, probly gonna steal a page from your book here, I've always known the /. test was a good one, never thought to spice the blurb with the hint of nudie pics.

Frowned on, not quite absolutely forbidden.

[abb3w]

From the What is Burning Man FAQ [burningman.com]:

Q. What is the policy on taking pictures?
A. Film and video cameras are forbidden without permission. All video cameras must be registered and tagged. This is to protect the privacy of participants and artists alike. Use Agreement forms for personal video cameras will be available upon arrival at the Gate, the Greeter's Station or Playa Info. If you are considering filming or videotaping for professional purposes, you must have a commercial agreement on file with the Media Team prior to your arrival onsite. Commercial use of images taken at Burning Man without permission is subject to cunning legal action and punishable by death. This includes amateurs and professionals who capture images. Click here for further information.

He's done this before, so he probably got permission for the camera. (He regularly does a panorama [templetons.com], it seems.)