Posts by James Radley

Wireless security

It's a bit poor to link use of Wireless security to the use of WEP. The sophisticated hacker is just some skiddiot with a copy of airhack. Its far more secure to have an open access point, and then to have a firewall on the inside.

But in this test the "open wireless + firewall" approach would be marked down as less secure than WEP. Which is daft.

Filtering

I did notice on FB this week, that they are starting to filter out some of the Wall using text matching, to try and reduce the spam.

To be honest, the majority of spam that I got in FB came from the fwits who belived that hitting "Forward(fast)" was actually a way to find out who fancied you. Everyone knows you have to hit ALT-F4 to find that information.

It's like infantile IRC tricks all over again. But fortunately, it's now been filtered out which should stop most spam from spreading.

Top police humour

Does anyone else think something might be amiss when Captain "Johnson" says "Once you think you've seen it all, something else comes around."

Which for a story about a man pleasuring himself using the umbrella hole in a picnic table is so apt....

Mines the one with the toy police badge pinned to it.

Hmm

Don't the domestic/international passengers at Gatwick also share a departures lounge. It's just that Gatwick uses a facial biometric ( ie. a photograph ) to do the same job.

I've also encountered the photo system at Luton, where there were some building works going on, which meant a temporary mingling of the arriving and departing passengers.

@AC

It's lovely to say that you get what you pay for. I'm paying for Nildram, with 50Gb* per month bandwith, static IP, reasonably intelligent call centre staff etc.

I will have a hump now if I get given Tiscali ( ie cheap ) service for this money -- and will be straight off to Zen. I noticed my network went down this morning at 4am. I am certainly not getting what I paid for.

IIRC Nildrams bandwidth throttling basically takes your bandwidth down to 64kbps if you go over the transfer limit, until the next month comes along. A bit different from the "turn of P2P overnight" approach that Tiscali seems to have.

* Yes, I use a fair chunk of my allocation. No, I don't download warez, films, mp3z or anything else I'm not supposed to.

As Chris said

Nokia haven't removed the real time cross, just the ability to follow a route. Real time route following was always flagged as some sort of premium service.

The blue GPS position cross is still very much functional in the 2.0.015 firmware. I would have never found the Red Lion last night without it. In fact, the GPS positioning in the new firmware is rather excellent.

I've still not got into the TomTom/Garmin set and I still think it's neat to have a Global A-Z in my pocket at all times, along with a flashing "You are here" symbol.

What encryption

Just had a browse of the MS Hardware website. In their defence, I can't, at first sight see any sign that the communication between keyboard and receiver is encrypted anyway.

It's likely the HID is XOR'd just to avoid namespace conflicts with the other wireless keyboard across the room. You are unlikely to have 256 keyboards in 10m range so that would be enough.