Imagine you're me. I work in a hospital with no wi-fi or cell network near my office. With this, I could take pictures with my iphone from my magnifi adapter and share them with my colleagues in other offices. Maybe we could even facetime a consult. And I could do it all without dealing with the hospital's IT department.

Crazy? Actually, I have it on good report that the chairman of pathology at the Mayo Clinic just bought all the pathologists Magnifi adapters to do exactly that (the exact words were "Hey, Mayo's chairman just bought all the pathologists adapters, just like yours, to facetime consults to each other).

Presumably, the chairman at Mayo has more clout than a resident at a military hospital though. If I want to introduce innovation, it's going to have to be on my own, provably separate from the institution. So this is perfect for my use case.

A) Facetime wouldnt work without Internet connection to Apple's servers

B) Even if you used some sort of video app that worked on the Piratebox, discussing PHI/PII over an open unencrypted WIFI network would violate all kinds of HIPAA regulations.

C) The IT Department is there for a reason, stop trying to break security protocols. Especially when you are Department of Defense.

D) This thing isn't actually secure/private like it says it is. They said there are no logins. And your MAC address is still associated to a device. Even if you spoofed it, you still have to be 30 ft near the thing. Not hard to hide.

Can't you just switch on the Wifi-hotspot on your iPhone and connect together that way?

Power dissipates with r squared and interference is always an issue. So if I set one of these on top of a refrigerator in the middle of the lab, I could probably hit most of the resident offices and some of the staff. But most of the residents couldn't get to each other with just their iphones.

you just moved things around. if my phone is then closer to other people while this device is on another floor, they would have better acces on my phone wifi.

unless this evolves to a mesh it is just a hyped AP

> while this device is on another floor

Where did another floor come in?

same place where "top of a refrigerator" in your post. just moving stuff around as well.

yep. this is a solution looking for a problem i think.

my router already does all that. and it was before i flashed openwrt on it.

So does mine. My thought before this PirateBox thing was to just plug an old router in, yeah, maybe flash it to openwrt. If anything, this gives me a reason to pause and think harder about what some of the issues are that they may have thought of but I haven't.

It's more like a sharepoint with wifi access and a bunch of applications installed.

Which would be an excellent way to pitch it. I get the whole anarchist thing but calling it "PirateBox" is going to incite antibodies in nearly any IT dept. Its like naming the Wifi at your house "FBI Surveillance Van 2".

That said, with a unique 'box' identifier and a simple store and forward protocol you could have them link together into a simple network, where you could pass messages or files with addresses like box1!box2!box3!userhandle :-)

> FBI Surveillance Van 2

I've heard of people doing this to scare the crap out of their low-key criminal neighbours.

> box1!box2!box3!userhandle

That's called Source Routing, and is what cjdns [1] does, although in a more federated and private manner. There's an OpenWRT firmware called meshbox [2] that works on the same devices as PirateBox (and more).

There's no apps shipped with it, but instead you get a secure, adhoc, near-zeroconf mesh network.

[1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns [2] https://github.com/SeattleMeshnet/meshbox

The bang path and "store and forward protocol" bit probably refers to mail routing in the UUCP days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing

ah ok. but why the downvotes? its exactly what i thought it was (minus the bunch of application, which i agree makes a one node mesh network a little bit less useless)