Thursday, August 17, 2006
Bad Monkeys


From Wired News

Across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet, the tech infrastructure in this high mountain village is a mess.

But a former Silicon Valley dot-commer and members of the underground security group Cult of the Dead Cow are working with local Tibetan exiles to change that using recycled hardware, solar power, open-source software and nerd ingenuity . . .

Some of the technical challenges they faces are unique. This may be one of the
only networks in the world where antennas must be monkey-proofed.

"Monkeys are everywhere," says Yahel Ben-David. "Often, you'll see a huge, gorilla-sized monkey hang on to an antenna, swing from it, eat it, try to break it. We lost a lot of cables that way, but now we use very strong equipment so that even monkeys can't break it."