Last week I was feeling a bit adventurous and decided to check if I was in range of any of the popular hotspots from my favourite coffee places. No sooner I got close to the first place I pulled out my pda and tapped on the Wi-Fi setting. Needless to say within seconds my pda was beeping to its heart’s content with the number of access points it discovered. Most of these access points were residential, whilst a couple of others were hotspots associated with these providers in the area (Vodafone and Go Mobile).

I’ll have to admit i was surprised to see all those access points showing up. Practically one out of three houses was sporting a wireless router which anyone could discover. Wireless routers are easy to buy and plug in, the question is how many users take the bother on turning on the security features on their wireless access points once they plug them in?

That was a question that my iPAQ could provide an answer for. I loaded up wififofum and had it analyse my surroundings (a freeware network stumbler which i use to test wireless networks when I am setting them up, I also use net stumbler for more rigorous testing routines). Soon enough it returned with a list of all the available access points and what security measures they were sporting. I was pleased to see that quite a few of the users had actually bothered to turn on the security features, but i was also shocked to notice that nearly half of the networks i found were open without any security measures set up to counter anyone living close by or who might be walking, driving or just having a coffee at a restaurant with a pda or laptop equipped with a wireless card.

Securing a network from intruders isn’t too hard now a days. A typical router will sport of the latest encryption software (e.g. WEP encryption is one of the more common forms of encryption, but not the more secure of the lot) which is quite easy to set up. For the more advanced users I would suggest locking the device with mac addresses to ensure that no one is tapping into your network. Securing your network takes minutes, but can spare you hours if not days of problems which might arise from leaving the network open.

Links:

• Vodafone Malta
• Go Mobile
• Wififofum
• Net Stumbler

In this follow up I will be looking into the concept of bulk mailing and how users are lured into signing up for them. There is a tendency on the internet that most users like to sign up for online services or forums and end up receiving more than they bargained for.

Signups are the easiest means of filling your mailbox with unwanted mails. More often than not when downloading free applications like Adobe Reader or Quicktime Media player the user is asked for his or her details, including their e-mail address.  A tick box is usually made available to select if you want to receive news from this website (more often than not ticked for you by default). A common mistake that most users are sucked into is the fact that in their rush to download the desired application, they leave any tick boxes with their default settings which would entitle them to receive the much dreaded “community updates” (a very polite way of referring to spam i.e. unless the user actually did want to sign up for it).

Forum signups are more often than not yet another source of unwanted mail. Forums are spaces where people share and discuss their ideas in an open environment. Modern forums also support the facility (optional in certain cases … restricted in others) to have replies to conversations that the users sent posts to, sent to them by mail. This might be acceptable if the users receive maybe one post a day, but there are cases where if each user partakes in more than one conversation and all of these are forwarded to their respective mailboxes, it might be the case that the user might be receiving an unacceptable number of mails per day.

When signing up for services it is imperative that the user informs himself properly about what the sign up entails because you can never be too cautious when divulging private information such as an e-mail address.

Anyone who has been on the net must have at some point in time been afflicted by the infamous problem of spam. For those of you who have been lucky enough not to have had any contact with it (virtually no one i presume) you can read more about it here.

Recently i was wondering what could be the best solution to spam. This lead me to thinking back to the days when i was plagued with spam and wondering what i was doing wrong.

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