Pigeon with a Thumb Drive beats ADSL

In college we had a joke about "Sneaker Net." Back in those days, the joke was that it was faster to load a file onto a floppy, walk it down the hall in the dorm, and copy it off the floppy onto another computer, than it would be to transfer the same file over the school network. Of course, those were the days of dial-up and things have come a long way.

But perhaps not so much in Africa, where a carrier pigeon carrying a 4 GB thumb drive delivered a large file 60 miles faster than the local ADSL. By the time the pigeon arrived, the file had only transferred 4% across the network

iPhones knock out Duke Wifi?

Among the various iPhone bugs reported out there this one must be the most troubling. It appears that under some conditions, iPhones can flood a Wifi network and end up taking out wireless routers altogether. This has ONLY been reported at Duke, so far, but one must wonder how long until we see something similar.

The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school’s pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

Of course, the beauty of a software-focussed device like the iPhone is that bugs like this can usually be fixed by a software or firmware update. On a more "normal" phone, it might take a recall to repair.