Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow (best classic books to read .txt) 📗

than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and assembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt passed down to him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he was grinding underfoot.

Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't want them to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckies with a hammer before they pitch 'em out."

He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.

Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'd transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a dozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies and other garbage pickers.

As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing a shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking morons -- they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten bucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like raccoons in the trash, chasing after nickel deposits."

"But then what would you pick?"

Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you see? There's a hundred times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had a squint of ambition, we could double the amount we save from the trash."

"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant it as a compliment. After all, wasn't he an extraordinary person, too?

Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.

He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in its LCD.

He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year's software. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that the picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.

They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and glasses of sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.

"How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?" Kurt said. "I mean, all this work, and we've hardly gotten four or five square blocks covered."

"Buck up," Alan said. "We could spend another two years just helping people in the Market use what we've installed, and it would still be productive." Kurt's mouth opened, and Alan held his hand up. "Not that I'm proposing that we do that. I just mean there's plenty of good that's been done so far. What we need is some publicity for it, some critical mass, and some way that we can get ordinary people involved. We can't fit a critical mass into your front room and put them to work."

"So what do we get them to do?"

"It's a good question. There's something I saw online the other day I wanted to show you. Why don't we go home and get connected?"

"There's still plenty of good diving out there. No need to go home anyway -- I know a place."

They drove off into a maze of cul-de-sacs and cheaply built, gaudy monster homes with triple garages and sagging rain gutters. The streets had no sidewalks and the inevitable basketball nets over every garage showed no signs of use.

Kurt pulled them up in front of a house that was indistinguishable from the others and took the laptop from under the Buick's seat, plugging it into the cigarette lighter and flipping its lid.

"There's an open network here," Kurt said as he plugged in the wireless card. He pointed at the dormer windows in the top room.

"How the hell did you find that?" Alan said, looking at the darkened window. There was a chain-link gate at the side of the house, and in the back an aboveground pool.

Kurt laughed. "These 'security consultants'" -- he made little quotes with his fingers -- "wardrove Toronto. They went from one end of the city to the other with a GPS and a wireless card and logged all the open access points they found, then released a report claiming that all of those access points represented ignorant consumers who were leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and making Internet connections available to baby-eating terrorists.

"One of the access points they identified was mine, for chrissakes, and mine was open because I'm a crazy fucking anarchist, not because I'm an ignorant 'consumer' who doesn't know any better, and that got me to thinking that there were probably lots of people like me around, running open APs. So one night I was out here diving and I really was trying to remember who'd played the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, and I knew that if I only had a net connection I could google it. I had a stumbler, an app that logged all the open WiFi access points that I came into range of, and a GPS attachment that I'd dived that could interface with the software that mapped the APs on a map of Toronto, so I could just belt the machine in there on the passenger seat and go driving around until I had a list of all the wireless Internet that I could see from the street.

"So I got kind of bored and went back to diving, and then I did what I usually do at the end of the night, I went driving around some residential streets, just to see evidence of humanity after a night in the garbage, and also because the people out here sometimes put out nice sofas and things.

"When I got home, I looked at my map and there were tons of access points out by the industrial buildings, and some on the commercial strips, and a few out here in the residential areas, but the one with the best signal was right here, and when I clicked on it, I saw that the name of the network was 'ParasiteNet.'"

Alan said, "Huh?" because ParasiteNet was Kurt's name for his wireless project, though they hadn't used it much since Alan got involved and they'd gotten halfway legit. But still.

"Yeah," Kurt said. "That's what I said -- huh? So I googled ParasiteNet to see what I could find, and I found an old message I'd posted to toronto.talk.wireless when I was getting started out, a kind of manifesto about what I planned to do, and Google had snarfed it up and this guy, whoever he is, must have read it and decided to name his network after it.

"So I figger: This guy wants to share packets with me, for sure, and so I always hunt down this AP when I want to get online."

"You've never met him, huh?"

"Never. I'm always out here at two a.m. or so, and there's never a light on. Keep meaning to come back around five some afternoon and ring the bell and say hello. Never got to it."

Alan pursed his lips and watched Kurt prod at the keyboard.

"He's got a shitkicking net connection, though -- tell you what. Feels like a T1, and the IP address comes off of an ISP in Waterloo. You need a browser, right?"

Alan shook his head. "You know, I can't even remember what it was I wanted to show you. There's some kind of idea kicking at me now, though..."

Kurt shifted his laptop to the back seat, mindful of the cords and the antenna. "What's up?"

"Let's do some more driving around, let it perk, okay? You got more dumpsters you want to show me?"

"Brother, I got dumpsters for weeks. Months. Years."

It was the wardriving, of course. Alan called out the names of the networks that they passed as they passed them, watching the flags pop up on the map of Toronto. They drove the streets all night, watched the sun go up, and the flags multiplied on the network.

Alan didn't even have to explain it to Kurt, who got it immediately. They were close now, thinking together in the feverish drive-time on the night-dark streets.

"Here's the thing," Kurt said as they drank their coffees at the Vesta Lunch, a grimy 24-hour diner that Alan only seemed to visit during the smallest hours of the morning. "I started off thinking, well, the cell companies are screwed up because they think that they need to hose the whole city from their high towers with their powerful transmitters, and my little boxes will be lower-power and smarter and more realistic and grassroots and democratic."

"Right," Alan said. "I was just thinking of that. What could be more democratic than just encouraging people to use their own access points and their own Internet connections to bootstrap the city?"

"Yeah," Kurt said.

"Sure, you won't get to realize your dream of getting a free Internet by bridging down at the big cage at 151 Front Street, but we can still play around with hardware. And convincing the people who already know why WiFi is cool to join up has got to be easier than convincing shopkeepers who've never heard of wireless to let us put antennae and boxes on their walls."

"Right," Kurt said, getting more excited. "Right! I mean, it's just ego, right? Why do we need to control the network?" He spun around on his cracked stool and the waitress gave him a dirty look. "Gimme some apple pie, please," he said. "This is the best part: it's going to violate the hell out of everyone's contracts with their ISPs -- they sell you an all-you-can-eat Internet connection and then tell you that they'll cut off your service if you're too hungry. Well, fuck that! It's not just community networking, it'll be civil disobedience against shitty service-provider terms of service!"

There were a couple early morning hard-hats in the diner who looked up from their yolky eggs to glare at him. Kurt spotted them and waved. "Sorry, boys. Ever get one of those ideas that's so good, you can't help but do a little dance?"

One of the hard-hats smiled. "Yeah, but his wife always turns me down." He socked the other hard-hat in the shoulder.

The other hard-hat grunted into his coffee. "Nice. Very nice. You're gonna be a lot of fun today, I can tell."

They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt's Buick.

"Hang on," Alan said. "Let's have a walk, okay?" The city smelled like morning, dew and grass and car-exhaust and baking bread and a whiff of the distant Cadbury's factory oozing chocolate miasma over the hills and the streetcar tracks. Around