Technology for Mortals

Mass media and blogosphere hysteria ensued after several ISPs (including AT&T) responded to customer complaints and blocked an IP address that was transmitting massive amounts of Denial of Service (DoS) traffic. For something as routine as and essential as blocking a malicious attack from a computer on the Internet, all hell broke loose late Sunday evening and early Monday morning because the IP address belonged to a popular image sharing site called 4chan whose members are infamous for perpetrating porn flooding pranks on YouTube as well as organizing DoS attacks against other websites.

Read the rest at DigitalSociety.org

I travel quite a bit these days because of my job, and I have been noticing more and more than I can get AT&T hotspot service at places like Starbucks or many airports and some hotels.  In the past, one would have to pay $20 per month for T-Mobile hotspot services or cough up $10 or more per day for Wi-Fi access.  Now if you’re an AT&T DSL customer, you get this service for free which is really convenient.  Even if you have 2G or 3G data service, you will still want to use the much lower latency Wi-Fi access when it is available.

While this Wi-Fi service is nothing new and I’m not making news here, it’s good to point this out for people since not everyone knows about it.  The coverage seems to be getting better over time.  So if you’re already an AT&T DSL customer, simply use your username and the domain you belong to which you can pull down from a menu such as SBCGlobal.net.  Then you use the same DSL password you use for your PPPoE account.

If I was still blogging at ZDNet, I’d file this under my old Energy Efficiency category.  It’s been nearly a year ago since I covered the Green Grid at Linux World and I know the folks who head up that consortium pretty well and it’s definitely a worthwhile cause.  I recall raising the concern that many IT departments don’t really pay energy costs and it doesn’t factor in to their department’s bottom line so it’s good to see that they’re championing the concept of some sort of corporate Energy Czar.

It’s obvious when energy is being wasted, it goes beyond the IT budget and affects the company’s bottom line not to mention the environmental impact.  I’ll also have to give myself a shameless plug to my print article going up for FedTech Magazine middle of August on “Power Management: Beyond the hype“.  Sorry, no linky here since it’s on this ancient thing that old folks called “paper” (just kidding, I like paper, really, I do!)

Anyhow, what’s more good news is that large telecoms like AT&T are joining the Green Grid and they’re bringing us energy efficient IPTV Set-Top Boxes.  The more corporations that join Green Grid, the better.  Aside from the energy savings, I don’t know anyone who likes a hot and noisy Set-Top Boxes

Hey that reminds me, I’m in the process of building a sub 30 watt server terabyte gigabit NAS with wire speed performance, and no you didn’t read that wrong.  I know I haven’t put up any interesting PC projects lately but bear with me, I’ve been busy with the new job.

Nathan McFeters has an interesting post (original story from MacRumors) on how Apple and AT&T are using a simple HTTP header from the iPhone as a form of Access Control to grant Apple iPhones free hotspot service.  It doesn’t take much to figure out how to spoofed that HTTP header by any computer which will allow you to quickly gain free Wi-Fi service.

But I thought about it for a second and thought hey, it’s no worse than MAC filtering which is universally used at every for-fee hotspots.  The right sniffer and the right script can quickly change your MAC address to one that’s already logged in from some other user who already paid to gain access.  Just find a user on one end of the terminal, get the MAC address, then go to the other end where you’re waiting for your airplane so that your MAC addresses aren’t conflicting with each other on the same Access Point.

Sigh, I’ve been talking about how to secure a for-fee hotspot with 802.1x more than three years ago but I haven’t seen any takers yet.  I’ve also been advocating an anonymous secure hotspot more than a year ago.  If you don’t think this is a big deal, read this on sidejacking and read how even SSL doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.  Heck I’m in the process of converting www.ForMortals.com to auto redirect everything to HTTPS SSL mode.