Ramblings of a Technology Addict

Friday, January 10, 2003

Technology Entry!

Okay, this is going to be a bit detailed.
First of all, I think I'm going to have kick some ass over at Cisco for making their Pix VPN routers such a pain to deal with. First of all, their "browser configuration manager" should really read "Browser configuration manager only if you have windows, if you have a Mac, I'm really sorry." And to say that their documentation is difficult to understand is like saying that sanskrit is a dead language: a deep understatement.
So, what should have taken possibly an hour took about three or so, as we struggled with the cisco language structure and command syntax to set up the firewall to be configurable from outside the firewall. Thanks guys! *sigh*
My friend Mike and I were talking today about what he was looking forward to at SXSW in March: mainly, Airport connection in the meeting rooms. Well, this is what I discovered at Macworld Expo: poorly planned wireless nets are worse than no wireless at all. The Expo floor was covered in secured base stations that were on conflicting channels. It was such a nightmare.
There was a saving grace, however, thanks to Macwarehouse, who were providing WiFi internet access in the main hallway between stations, however, there wasn't enough space on their networks, their networks were prone to some hacking, and evne worse: phreaking. That's right, some script kiddies with a Linux Vaio showed up with some packet watchers to grab peoples' email passwords that were passed in plaintext. Worse yet: what they did was totally legal.
Now I have to change all my passwords.
Lessons:

proper planning of WiFi networks on a convention floor is a requirement.
secured email password passing through ssl or other medium should be a requirement.
hacker kids deserve beatings. The more public, the more violent, the better.

In order for Rendezvous to take off as a messaging zeroconf platform, it needs to handle not just peer to peer messaging (which it does right now) but also multiparty messaging, like an IRC daemon can. Perhaps there needs to be a small server built into iChat 2 that would handle multiple individual chats. The current implementation is good, but not good for say, conference sessions where you've got ad hoc networking, but not attached networks.
Just some stuff to think about.
7:58:38 PM comment []