Slurpr: Cool black box or jail bait?

The design is based on a Routerboard 532A motherboard with 564 daughterboard and can accept six miniPCI wireless cards. It runs Debian and uses load-balancing to combine the bandwidth from up to six wireless connections.

Pre-orders for deliveries starting in August are being accepted at Mark’s geektechnique.org site at a price of 999 Euros, which doesn’t include shipping or taxes.

Mark is aware of the legal ramifications of providing the product and is running two surveys to see whether WEP cracking capability should be included (82% say yes) and whether buyers would be willing to sign a waiver regarding the legal ramifications of using the product (77% say yes).

Will be interesting to see if this ever makes it into production. If you’re planning to attend The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam next week, you may get a chance to see the Slurpr in action.

Update:Has Airgo no shame?

Just before Monday broke here on the East coast, Qualcomm (which minutes later announced that it was acquiring Airgo) "announced the availability of the world's first chipset offering full support for Draft 2.0 of the IEEE 802.11n standard". As Glenn Fleishman points out in his post, since Draft 2.0 won't be voted on until March of next year, this announcement is pitching a chipset that is based upon a "draft of a draft".

We all knew that at some point Airgo would come off its mountain and wallow in the pre-standard mud along with Broadcom, Atheros and Marvell. So I guess if you're going to get dirty, you might as well set a new standard. Congratulations to both Airgo and its proud new owner Qualcomm for establishing a new low in WLAN marketing practices.