This is of some concern. The smarter these get, the more ability they have to track who you are, what you do, where you go, when, and keep a completed record of this information. The article mentions using multiple antennas, which to me seems like an open invitation for triangulation of user movement.

EE Times: Smart antennas set to take off. Established infrastructure vendors are starting to integrate smart antennas into their designs as wireless operators exhaust conventional methods of increasing their network capacity, said Andy Fuertes, senior analyst at Visant and author of the study. [Tomalak's Realm]
10:21:20 PM    comment []

Ready to sign up for walk around wireless, or do you plan to live off the land for your wireless?

Verizon Wireless fires up hot spots. The service provider announces a Wi-Fi service for its customers in hundreds of hot spot locations throughout the nation. [CNET News.com]
10:09:55 PM    comment []

Worried about an internal "rogue" access point? Looks like IBM is doing what many companies have also been doing- self-sniffing. Turns out, they might even release this as a product.

Q&A: IBM's Brian Connors talks about Wi-Fi trends, plans. Brian Connors, CTO of IBM's Personal Computing Division, talked about the future of wireless and Big Blue's plans for Wi-Fi. [Computerworld News]
10:06:55 PM    comment []

If you've never heard of tripwire, its actually pretty cool. It makes a signature for various well known files and those desired. This signature is checked to alert you if someone has modified the files being watched.

Vendor coalition touts file validation plan as security measure. The File Signature Database would allow users to validate their software systems and applications by comparing files to a known "good state" database. [Computerworld News]
9:51:23 PM    comment []

The game was called ANIMAL, a self-learning variation of 20 questions which asked you to "think of an animal." Tired of mailing several copies of the game on magnetic disks out to curious geeks, he started work on a clever way to distribute the ANIMAL executable to every Univac system in the world. He coded a subroutine called PERVADE, which could be called by any program and quietly copied itself into every directory that the current user had access to. It eventually made its way into software distribution tapes from Univac themselves. The entire story, with assembly source code for ANIMAL and PERVADE, is available from Walker's homepage.

Written in 1982 for the Apple II, the first microcomputer virus was also (mostly) benign. In 9th grade, Richard Skrenta, Jr. wrote a program called Elk Cloner that stayed resident in system memory after its disk was removed, but would later copy itself to any new disk inserted into the drive. Elk Cloner counted the number of times the infected disk was booted from, and on the fiftieth boot, the screen would display a little poem. The source code for Elk Cloner is available from Rich's website.

You might know Rich from his later work; he went on to co-found NewHoo, later renamed to DMOZ (aka the Open Directory Project). [Waxy.org]
9:45:54 AM    comment []