The politics of Wi-Fi names

<i>We found 1140 results for "Obama" and an additional 6 that contained "Romney"" - for some reason people are far more likely to reference Obama over Romney when naming their router.</i><p>Seriously? Maybe because one has been president for four years and the other is just a blip right now with the potential of either becoming president or just another has-been?

From my hometown (Oslo) you found «Obama killed me» to be in favor of him. I'm not sure it is (or not), but still, kind of funny.<p>Screenshot: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/lGXZA.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/lGXZA.png</a>

<a href="http://gawker.com/5832665/do-not-name-your-wifi-network-fbi-surveillance-van" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5832665/do-not-name-your-wifi-network-fbi-...</a><p>Spoilers: I live in a very dense apartment building and my wifi network is FBI_Surveillance_Van. I totally thought of it first.

I think "obamanation" and all its variants can be interpreted either way. It is used with a negative connotation in many cases, e.g. obamanation.com or the book "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality."

Haha man, today was "one of those days" here in Argentina, and now this.<p>Can you believe Cristina (you know, the president) literally went and told a senator from her party in the middle of a speech "hey go easy with the nose candy"<p>Yeah so they guy went a little apeshit during an interview before that, but can you imagine a president telling that to a senator, from her own party, during a speech live on national TV?<p>That's Cristina, just to show the politicians in your country aren't as bad as you think.

gobama != G Obama<p>gobama = Go Alabama<p>Almost all of the entrees in Alabama were GoBama :)

I've been meaning to write a script to update a wifi access point every time I tweet but I've never gotten around to figuring out how to do it.<p>In college, my roommates and I spent at least 2 days trying to figure out the name for our router. We settled on "The girls upstairs suck" because some girls lived above us and we were college guys trying to be funny. Later on, it turned out they weren't paying for Internet and they were using ours. (We gave them the password so they could have Internet while theirs was getting "fixed")<p>I always try to name it something that passive aggressively yells at my neighbors. "Clean up after your dogs" "Don't be loud at 4AM". Right now it's called "Frasier Crane" because I just moved to Seattle and thought and used to like watching Frasier.<p>I love wi-fi names.

What is OpenSignalMaps' business model? Do they sell the cell coverage data to network providers who are looking to improve coverage? The company has been around since 2010, so they must be making some money.

I find the naming of access points interesting; I've chosen a unique name for my AP, and wonder how common that is among the HN crowd?<p>Most of the APs in my neighborhood are "myqwest.xxxx" and I've always thought that was a function of laziness/ apathy, but perhaps it is in the interest of not standing out? Probably not, but I wish more people took interest in their routers as they are becoming quite capable nowadays. Fon was/ is a cool idea, and I think some company should try to take it to the next level since Fon seems to have stopped innovating.

That's really interesting. Until recently I'd never come across people using SSIDs to express their political opinions, but one of my neighbours has just started using "Vote Labour" as theirs (Labour is the current UK opposition party). I can just about understand people expressing their like or dislike of Obama, but exactly how many floating voters will be swayed by a WiFi access point?

Does anyone where I can download their data? It says Open and uses user-supplied data so I assume it is available somewhere?

Does this fit into the theory that when it comes to politics Americans vote out of spite. That Americans to a large degree vote against someone rather than for someone as a result of the limited amount of choices(2).

I can't help but wonder why you'd name your wifi something negative. I mean, I can get into showing your support, but I wouldn't even think of someone I hated while naming my network.

I could imagine that in redneck country.<p>I always call mine something rude. It seems to effectively stop people trying to connect to it. Security by lack of obscurity.<p>Currently it's iloveanal

I'm guessing the "obama is a trini" in ozone park brooklyn is actually positive... that's quite near a big trinidadian population.

How interesting. Of course it's a very quick and crude method, but still fun. Are these DBs available for further sifting?