TUNNELING THE DUTCH BEACHES

Article from Issue 71/2006

Author(s): CHARLY KÜHNAST

What does Charly’s recent two-week vacation in Holland have in common with an SSH session? Nothing at all, at first sight. And therein lies a tale.

People from Germany’s lower Rhine area have a somewhat ambivalent attitude to their Dutch neighbors across the border. But I like the Dutch; I even had a Dutch girlfriend once, from Zwolle. And as Holland has a good offering of Internet hot-spots, I decided to head for the coastal province of North Holland. Unfortunately, I could find no Dutch people there at the time – they had all gone off to watch the World Cup in Germany[1], but at least that saved me from making a fool of myself trying to speak Dutch to the locals. And Internet access was available, not at our holiday home as I had anticipated, but at a small café a good walking distance away. The WLAN hotspot promised access to anyone willing to pay the indecently high airtime fees. There are ways of tunneling through these kinds of constructions, but that would have been unfair, so I paid up.

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