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The story sounds almost like a Hollywood plot, except it is true: A young starlet doing nude scenes as a teenager who goes on to invent a critical wartime technology that is ignored by the US Navy but ultimately forms the basis of Wi-Fi and cell phones that we use today. Of course, I am talking about the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, the subject of a new biography from Richard Rhodes.

WiFi service aggregator Boingo will offer a free VPN as part of its access service, beginning now in beta and rolled out gradually over the next several months. If you are looking for a reason to purchase the service, this is a good one. Of course, you can always run your own personal VPN when you are roaming the halls of airports and sitting at coffee bars, but this seems like a good deal for the added security involved.

What is required to take your family on a cross-country move these days? With four kids, four adults and three vehicles, it isn't easy. You might need almost a full-time IT department to keep everything running, or at least a full-time mediator to broker who is going to get which electronic device. It is part Carmen Sandiego, part Matt Lauer, and all Robyn Tipps and family. Tippins is our community manager and she and her family are relocating from left to right coast this week.

A little over a year ago, some new iPad owners found they were having issues with the device's Wi-Fi connection. Signals were weak, or worse, dropped altogether. The only solution at the time, before Apple released a fix, was to disable and re-enable the Wi-Fi connection.

Now, that same problem has returned, and this time, other iOS devices are affected, too, including the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Wireless consultant Chetan Sharma has just released an updated report on U.S. mobile data for the last quarter of 2010, and it points to the growth in the wireless market, in mobile penetration and in data usage. According to Sharma, the U.S. wireless data market grew 5% from the third quarter of 2010 and was up 23% from 2009 For the entire year, revenues were $55 billion, a figure that Sharma predicts will increase to $67 billion by the end of 2011.

As Sharma observes, the mobile market crossed a number of important thresholds in the last quarter of 2010. Mobile subscriptions crossed the 100% penetration mark, for example. And smartphone shipments exceeded PC shipments for the first time.

Above: WiFi signal spills gently into the street from an old Oslo apartment building built in the 1890's. Video below.

Wireless communication channels are all around us all the time, but their variable strengths in different places create a textured, invisible part of the urban landscape. A team of Norwegian researchers, arguing that WiFi is "a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities," created the beautiful video below visualizing the strength of WiFi signals around their neighborhood in Oslo. They used a four meter pole that measured signal strength and lit up to a great or lesser degree. Then they took time delayed photos of themselves walking through the snowy streets.

"The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host," writes the team in Immaterials: Light painting WiFi "Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses."

With mobile phones nearing 100% market penetration, the Chinese government appears determined to transform the country's widespread telephone booths into wifi hotspots. "Telecom operators are also trying to setup hotspots in restaurants, hotels, sport facilities, and so on," writes Asian tech blogger Sherman So. "If the idea is really implemented, they will turn every city in China into a giant Wi-Fi network for fast internet connection." So's post was picked up today by design blog PSFK.

Though the plan raises concerns about the consequences for the disenfranchised, it's not hard to imagine big benefits for economic development. Ubiquitous Wi-Fi seems like one of the prerequisites for bringing a country's whole population online and onboard a new economy based largely on the Internet. Imagine everyone not just reading, but writing to the Web from any street corner they like.

If yesterday's announcement of the Verizon iPhone and its promise to be able to generate a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five mobile devices is the thing that has you contemplating a switch to the carrier, then you might want to wait. Boy Genius Report says that a source tells it that this feature will be coming to all iPhones in iOS 4.3.

Of course, this will likely require carrier support, so AT&T users still might not benefit.

Starbucks announces the launch of the Starbucks Digital Network today. Powered by the free Starbucks WiFi, the digital network offers exclusive content to its in-store customers. Built in HTML5, the content is designed to work on all mobile devices - from notebooks to smartphones.

The network's content includes news, entertainment, business, and health channels, as well as local neighborhood information. Content providers for the network include Bookish Reading Club, Foursquare, GOOD, LinkedIn, New Word City, and The Weather Channel. And you'll be able to get access to special content from The New York Times, iTunes, and WSJ.com, the latter of which normally sits behind a paywall.

Google won't be resuming its use of Street View cars to collect information about Wi-Fi networks. So says the fine print of the Canadian Office of Privacy Commissioner's statement today, that as we reported earlier, found that Google had violated Canadians' privacy.

Google's Street View project has raised a number of privacy concerns, most notably in May when the company announced that it had mistakenly included code in its Street View software that collected Wi-Fi payload data. Google halted the Wi-Fi data collection, but it was unclear if this was a permanent decision.