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There’s two articles in today’s Honolulu newspapers about local Internet usage.

An article in the Honolulu Advertiser’s business section reports that Honolulu residents tend to spend more time on the Internet than the average US Internet user.

Oceanic Time Warner’s Road Runner cable modem service recently celebrated its 10th anniversary in Honolulu. The company reports that Honolulu is one of its most mature markets, with 220,000 customers. Many customers use residential broadband service to work from home.

Meanwhile, the lead story in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s business section examined the coffee shop office. At the bottom of the article, there’s a nice set of netiquette tips for public WiFi users. One major item in this list – people who buy little or nothing from a coffee shop while they use the free WiFi. Squatters beware!

Sadly, there wasn’t a single meaningful mention of security and privacy issues in either article. I recommend that anyone who uses their computer in a public place buy and use a privacy filter. This is a thin piece of polarized plastic that completely covers the screen. The filter restricts the viewing angle, making it difficult for anyone but the user to read the screen. 3M has a nice selection of filters that will fit most laptops. The Gadgeteer has a good review here.

The next two pictures demonstrate how a privacy filter works, by comparing a bare screen  on the left with the filtered screen on the right.

More public WiFi services are offering encrypted sessions, but it’s a good idea to use a VPN (virtual private network) to encrypt traffic. For companies whose employees tend to use public WiFi, a VPN is an easy expense to justify. Residential users can also set up their own VPN with a router, open source software or web-based services like GoToMyPC.

This article mentioned Kokua Wireless, a free municipal WiFi service that covers my office building in downtown Honolulu. Kokua’s coverage of downtown Honolulu is quite good, as shown in this screen shot from their mapping application.

Residential broadband providers have joined the battle for customer loyalty. Road Runner has Speed Zone, its own public WiFi network for its residential and business customers. Hawaiian Telcom partnered with Skywave to offer HT Spots, its own attempt at satisfying this key success factor. Users must have be a broadband subscriber to use these either of these services.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed more people around town using mobile data cards from Sprint, AT&T and Clearwire. These devices are more expensive and more secure than some public WiFi connections. Both HawTel and Oceanic offer encrypted public WiFi connections, of course.

This morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that Tri-Net Solutions has been installing a mesh WiFi network in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Mayor Mufi Hannemann will make a formal announcement of the new free wireless system at tomorrow’s First Friday event, but the network is already available. It’s not as fast as other services in the downtown area, but the city’s service is free and encrypted.

This project was first announced over a year ago. My first article on this topic was posted on 26 May, along with a preliminary map of the coverage area. Gordon Bruce, the city & county’s CIO, says that coverage may expand across downtown. The Star-Bulletin’s map shows several access locations near HPU, including Fisher Hawaii on Hotel and Fort Streets, and the Marks Garage. Tri-Net has installed at least 25 inexpensive mesh routers. Local business and property owners volunteer to host the routers and antennae.

There have been some changes. Hawaiian Electric and EarthLink have dropped out of the project. I discussed EarthLink’s recent problems on 27 August and 28 August, and discussed HECO’s plan on 11 June.

The city also revealed that first responders, including police, fire and other emergency services, have been outfitted with WiFi-equipped devices so that they can use the city’s service in their jobs.

The Honolulu Advertiser ran a front-page article this morning about the growing parking problems in Chinatown. I’ve worried that downtown businesses and colleges might face problems as more customers face longer waits to find that elusive parking space.

Companies keep moving downtown, and they sometimes wind up with more employees than dedicated parking spaces. The solutions range from shared parking spaces to subsidized bus passes!

Too many vehicles? Or not enough mass transit?

Recent figures indicate that there are 734,270 registered vehicles on Oahu. Another article in this morning’s Advertiser indicates there are 1.13 million vehicles in the state, while our population is 1.28 million people. Of course, the large rental car fleets on our islands are a part of this total, but it’s still alarming that there’s so many vehicles in our state.