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News that's changing the Wireless World!
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004 |
Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Wi-Fi Paranoia Too
High?
David Pogue wonders if the concern about Wi-Fi security is at too high a
pitch for home users: Pogue's email column, archived online, this week
questions whether there's too much focus on security. Now, I'm the first to
agree with him that people with home wireless networks that aren't near
neighbors have nothing to fear. Even if you have near neighbors, enabling
WEP or WPA, as Pogue recommends, lowers your risk from low to nil. (WEP's
key weakness that enables a cracker to break a key and access a network
could require weeks of network monitoring to extract enough data to carry
that out. It's only a quick crack on high-usage business Wi-Fi networks.)
But Pogue doesn't separate out different risk scenarios. My colleague and
co-author on The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, Adam Engst, wrote an
excellent essay on how to decide the level of exposure you have and how to
mitigate it which parallels Pogue on the home networking side, but is more
granular on risks outside the home network. Pogue opens his piece talking
about public Wi-Fi: "It's just so glorious to be standing in an airport,
hotel lobby or city street, open your laptop, and discover that you can go
online at cable-modem speeds without hooking up a single cable." But the
rest of his column focuses on home networking risks where I generally agree
with his take and his recommendations. Out in the wild, the risks are quite
high that someone could be monitoring an open free or fee-based Wi-Fi
hotspot network -- it's probably 1,000 to 10,000 times more likely that
someone is using software to monitor a hotspot than a home network. I have a
piece of software that I can run that automatically captures all passwords
passing over any network connection, Wi-Fi or otherwise, that requires me to
press a single keystroke to activate. You should never conduct unsecured
transactions over public hotspots using FTP, email, or the Web for this
reason: it requires no effort to capture those passwords, and people may
capture them idly. At the very least, your email password should be secured
via APOP (authenticated POP), which creates a one-time use token for access.
Your email would still pass in the clear, but your password would be
protected. Better, try to use SSL for email (POP and SMTP), or read your
email with a Web browser using an SSL...
Source Link
11:07:25 PM 
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Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Wi-Pics Connects
Digital Cameras to Wi-Fi Networks
Intermediary device turns any digital camera into a Wi-Fi-enabled
transmitter and storage device (reg. required): In Thursday's New York
Times, I write about Wi-Pics, a portable device that connects to a digital
camera's Compact Flash slot on one side and a Wi-Fi network on the other. It
ships in June for $1,700 with additional fees for a 40 Gb hard drive and
bar-code scanner, and it appears to fit a niche that certain kinds of
professional photographers are hard-pressed to find an alternative for
today. A few technical details that didn't make it into the Circuits
article: Wi-Pics uses Atheros chips and an Intel Xscale processor. It can
make secure, encrypted connections over FTP and the Web for storage. It has
a Compact Flash slot built in as well as the option of adding a hard drive.
The cable from the Compact Flash adapter to the Wi-Pics uses a flat profile
so that you can close a Compact Flash door (which many digital cameras
require to be closed to operate) and not hurt the cable. The cable connects
through a tripod mount to a thicker cable that runs to the camera. While my
article focused on some of the more typical uses that professionals might
find for this camera, I'm also interested in how Wi-Fi starts percolating
into individual application devices instead of multi-purpose computers and
handhelds. With the cost of Wi-Fi dropping and with Wi-Fi SD and Compact
Flash cards available, it's a short matter of time before $500 to $1000
cameras will support Wi-Fi cards....
Source Link
7:12:25 PM
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Source: Scripting.com
NY Times:
"Wi-Pics, from Dice America, is an external Wi-Fi transmitter and storage
device about the size of a portable CD player."
4:58:05 PM
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Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Which Hotspot Networks
Still Stand?
With the slow rundown of Cometa's clock starting today, which companies
remain standing?: I do have a little ego, and my article in Feb. 2001 in The
New York Times was the first comprehensive piece written in a major
publication about the nascent Wi-Fi hotspot industry. Several companies were
striving to raise funds into the mouth of the dotcom collapse, which claimed
bloated business plans or too early attempts to capitalize on a technology
that only a small number of laptop users had access to. While researching
the story in Dec. 2000, I spoke to the chief marketing officer of the
Aerzone division of Softnet. Three days after I spoke to him, Softnet pulled
the plug because they couldn't raise the funds to perform the build out that
they'd contracted with airlines and airports to handle. The firms I
interviewed for the article were Wayport, Surf and Sip, Global Digital
Media, AirWave, SkyLink (not quoted), and MobileStar. Let's start in reverse
order. What's clear from examining each of these firms is that execution and
timing mattered as much in 2001 as they do today: controlling costs and
building out a robust network in the right place can only go so far: users
who pay are still required. MobileStar: While initially well funded,
MobileStar had extremely high run rates. I's technical standards were top
notch, but expensive, and expenses ran far ahead of any potential revenue.
They went bankrupt late in 2001 and had their assets purchased by T-Mobile
HotSpot. The company reportedly went through as much as $90 million in
investment income while producing no more than a couple million in revenue.
T-Mobile has continued to use its brand name and high-level partnerships to
run what is generally considered to be an excellent network that's overprice
for day use, but not far out of scale on their unlimited monthly plans with
one-year commitment. Sky.Link Internet Plus: A promising Canadian firm with
hotel and airports service, the company disappeared abruptly a few months
after my article came out. It resurfaced briefly with fewer locations before
taking a final plunge. Its history and disappearance are a mystery. AirWave:
AirWave was a small San Francisco Bay Area set of hotspots in restaurants
and coffeeshops that decided that the software they'd written to manage
access points was a better product than the hotspot business. In 2002, they
exited hotspots, spinning off their locations to...
Source Link
4:36:01 PM
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Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Apartment Building
Offers Free But Not Permitted Wi-Fi to Residents
An apartment resident worked with his landlord to build out good Wi-Fi
coverage for free Internet access--but did he read the Comcast contract?:
The page documents how "JC" worked with his landlord to build out ubiquitous
coverage for the complex, incidentally benefitting himself by eliminating
his personal monthly broadband bill. But he notes they're paying $60 per
month to Comcast for their Internet feed, and at that rate, Comcast isn't
offering shared Internet access in this fashion. Comcast clearly only allows
use by people in the same household, and used to charge extra per machine
and try to restrict sharing by locking down use to a single Ethernet adapter
address. Given the promotion that JC's story has gotten, how long is it
before either Comcast shuts them down or Speakeasy Networks steps in and
offers free access in exchange for promotion? Speakeasy remains the only ISP
that I'm aware of that encourages the shared use of personal or business DSL
and T1 connections at all prices. [link via BoingBoing and NIgel
Ballard]...
Source Link
10:14:15 AM
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Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Open Source Virtual
GPS for Wi-Fi
While Quarterscope pursues worldwide wardriving to build its virtual GPS
database, the open-source Herecast project expects more grassroots
contributions: A few weeks ago, we wrote about Quarterscope, a company which
combines a database of wardriving-based GPS and Wi-Fi access point data with
live information from a Wi-Fi card to produce a virtual GPS. Mark Paciga
wrote in to point to his nascent effort, Herecast, which is an open-source
project to develop a similar resource that's a little more open-ended as to
goals. It can combine mapping, location information (you are here/you are
near...), and friend finding. The system doesn't use GPS mapping either on
the input side or output side, but rather tries to use wayfinding through
naming of familiar places in the vicinity. Paciga notes that it only took a
few hours to mock up functional demos. It's available now as a Pocket PC
beta, but he hopes to port it to Windows XP as well....
Source Link
9:42:56 AM
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Source: eWEEK Technology News
RIM Partners Introduce New BlackBerry Apps
Research in Motion development partners introduced a bevy of new
applications at the RIM Wireless Enterprise Symposium that extend the
BlackBerry wireless platform through the enterprise.
Source Link
8:50:35 AM
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Source: Wi-Fi Networking News
Cometa's Demise
Detailed
Reports today provide more detail on Cometa Networks' shutdown: In news
broken here yesterday, Cometa Networks will cease operations. Several
publications provide more insight into what happened and what will happen to
existing venues. Richard Shim of News.com offers good analysis that scale
and resale are the only ways in which hotspot networks can spread out
expense and have enough usage. One analyst notes what is becoming a refrain:
Wi-Fi service has to be an add-on package for existing offerings, not a
standalone subscription. Seattle reporter John Cook of The
Post-Intelligencer talks to Cometa's venue and reseller partners, who were
taken by surprise and are sorting through how to proceed....
Source Link
6:55:34 AM
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© 2004 [OCCalWUG]
Last Update: 6/1/2004; 2:48:02 AM
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