Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Do You Wi the Fi to San Jose?. Stockton to San Jose train route gets Wi-Fi: As with other solutions, RailPoint uses satellite for downstream, cell for upstream. Speed isn't mentioned, but the Altamount Commuter Express Rail expects more than 25 percent of passengers to use the service. Service is free during the three-month test starting in mid-September. The provider expects their partners to charge about $10 per day or $20 to $40 per month.... [Wi-Fi Networking News] The excitement behind this announcement eludes me. But then, I was using Ricochet on CalTrain to connect to the Internet in 1996. The service was remarkable, with a few constant dropouts (through the tunnels into San Francisco and for some strange reason at the Palo Alto CalTrain station). Before the network went belly up, I was browsing at 128k during my 90 minute commute. 6:07:31 PM     Comment []

Dear Friends If you run windows and get an email purportedly from me, please don't open any attachments. The attachment is the latest virus to hit the windows world. I didn't send it and my machine is not infected (just another reason to use a Mac). But at least three people who have my email address in their computers have been infected by it. Apparently, they are in good company, because I am receiving lots of the virus containing messages (currently about 20/hour). I am also receiving a number of bounce messages from systems that bright enough to figure out that a message contains a virus, but not bright enough to figure out that the "from" header is forged. Fortunately, most of this stuff is not getting to my inbox. SpamAssassin on the server is catching most of it and SpamSieve on my desktop is catching the rest (though an occasional bounce message is getting through). But since the virus payload is large (100k), I am concerned about my disk space. The costs of this attack are immeasurable. I am spending a good chunk of the day trashing files, monitoring the viruses effect on my uninfected systems, and writing about it. I am starting to think that attachments should be banned from email. This virus shows that email users can't be relied on to use good sense. 2:15:22 PM     Comment []