Memoirs of a Developer

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

With the advent of broadband, internet speeds now enable high quality voice and video streaming. Voip is a technology that was developed over the internet to enable people to communicate as easily as using a phone without incurring the costs a fixed land line would usually incur.

Over the last couple of months i have had a number of occasions where Voip proved to be very useful. Calling abroad from here (Malta) is expensive to say the least. Voip on the other hand is a standard rate for the entire world, provided that your internet connection is stable enough to support it.

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Yesterday the Firefox team released a securty update which should patch a DoS vulnerability (Denial of Service). This patch should be installed automatically for who ever has Firefox 1.5.0.2. Those who are running older versions should consider upgrading to this one.

Links:

• Firefox
• Bug Fixes