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LightRail art installation aims to bring San Francisco together
San Francisco's Market Street cuts through the center of the city, from the Embarcadero to the Castro. It's a microcosm of the highs and lows of not just the city, but the entire Bay Area. From the pageantry of high-end stores to boarded-up shops. Where the homeless sleep on sidewalks in front of the insular offices of tech giants Uber and Twitter. It's the segmented heart of the City by the Bay. Now local art collective Illuminate SF wants to unify the entire street by way of lights that track the public transportation system.
San Francisco takes the pain out of joining secure public WiFi
Security on public WiFi tends to be either non-existent or a bit of a hassle; it's not fun to track down passwords just so that you can get online from the street corner. If you frequently visit downtown San Francisco, though, it's now a relative breeze. The city has launched a new version of its public WiFi that uses the Hotspot 2.0 standard to give you an encrypted connection with a minimum of fuss. So long as you're using a recent platform (newer Android devices as well as iOS 7, OS X Mavericks and Windows 8), you only have to install a simple profile to get going instead of putting in some credentials.
San Francisco starts offering free WiFi, but only on Market Street
San Francisco promised city-scale free WiFi nearly seven years ago, and today it's finally acting on that promise -- if not quite with the same ambition it had in 2007. The city is now offering up to 50Mbps of gratis wireless internet, but only along a 3-mile stretch of Market Street between the Embarcadero and Castro Street. This is effectively a test run for the future park WiFi project, CIO Marc Touitou tells AllThingsD; any wider coverage will depend on how well this initial experiment works out. Despite the limited coverage, this could still be a boon to poorer residents and tourists who would otherwise stay offline.
