antoin@eire.com

According to a source in the industry, a third of orders for broadband in Ireland are made by immigrants (immigrants make up less than 10 percent of the population). I’m not sure what it means, but it definitely means something.

There’s a report in the papers and on the news today about offering Free wireless for Dublin City. The city council has tendered for consultants to evaluate what their approach should be.
At the same time, the city council is at pains to point out that it doesn’t have the 10 or 20 million euros this will cost available to roll out the network itself and will need help from the government or the private sector.
FON is the obvious answer to deploying this network. In the town of Blanquefort, FON rolled out 1000 hotspots in a matter of months to provide blanket wi-fi coverage.

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Pat Phelan is doing a deal where you can win a Pocket PC with Roam4free if you submit your comments about their new website. Good way to encourage feedback!

Daithi Mac Stithigh points out that today is European Data Protection day (see Lex Ferenda » Going on a data? Use protection). He also suggests that this is a good time to make a contribution to Digital Rights Ireland. It has to be said, data protection is a strange sort of law. But it is really important to understand it and enforce it, even when it doesn’t seem important.

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Eoin O’Dell has unleashed his new blog, cearta.ie on the world. Eoin is a lecturer in law and the most reliable source I know for infomation about anything legal - he seems to consume High Court rulings like children consume chocolate bars. He has advised the Irish government, through the Law Reform Commission about things like defamation law (although they don’t listen to what he says carefully enough). He is a board member of Digital Rights Ireland, and a very nice fellow too.

Waveson, a company in the famous town of Ballydehob, Co. Cork is providing wi-fi to the community through a wi-fi access point. You can see the development of FON in Ireland through FON maps. Waveson have gone to the trouble of personalizing their home page on their router, so you can find out more about the company when you access their hotspot.

Second Life, the big and overhyped virtual reality community has released the source code for its client under the GPL open source licence. (See reports - Boing Boing, developer’s blog, official release, official blog) This is something really big, it means that it is now viable to build a fully-fledged, free-standing, world-class virtual reality world without having to own or licence a bunch of proprietary code. (more…)