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WiFi and PrivateVPN.com
by Andrew McCaskey
I think it’s time I made some WiFi changes-
On the trip this past week, I was glad to see that there are more and more opportunities for Wifi – at least Wifi at a price – becoming available in all sorts of venues.
I am not sure how much of the capacity is really used. Even with highly crowded flights and terminals the “internet kiosks” that offer a chance to check your email for $5 seem to be in heavy use – but not for the reason that the entreprenuers anticipated. It generally relates to either (1)- AC power for your laptop so you can hit a hot spot, (2)- A general lack of airport seating other than the floor at crowded gate areas or (3) a place to balance the coffee and tasty airport pizza when performing the first two operations.
Other than those kiosks, though, it looks like LOTS of people are taking advantage of the WiFi access points. And, if your hotel is set up for WiFi, all you need to do is run a speed check every 20 minutes or so and watch the loading increase as the check-ins log on.
And that is where I am beginning to take some aspects of this wonderful connectivity with several grains of salt. I’ve heard for a year or two of the weakness of WEP on access points – at best a privacy measure and surely no protection against any determined attack. A recent article from Informit.com shows how easy it is for someone with malicious intent to crack WEP. Using WEP’s Integrity Check Value, it’s apparently trivial to capture and create a new, yet valid packet that can be injected into a WEP access point. Your cracking program has to guess the value of one byte- and keep guessing until the WEP says “congratulations, you guessed Right !” – and then the offset for all the other bytes in the connection is yours !
The program is called ChopChop – and it apparently delivers the goods pretty quickly.
So as I am traveling, thinking about using the WiFi to check my gmail, maybe ftp up some material – I start to think that this is not a good idea. Like really not a good idea. I am definitely investigating a service, called Public VPN.Their service creates a secure tunnel between your laptop and the PublicVPN.com servers. When you connect to PublicVPN.com, all your Internet traffic goes through this encrypted tunnel, preventing users nearby from intercepting your information. It’s pretty reasonable, as well – $6 per month via Paypal or $60 per year. Since I am going to be headed out to Gnomedex in a few days, I need to get this set up – and then run a test at the local Panera Bread. I”ll let you know of the progress. Meantime, you may want to read the article and think before you use that wonderful WiFi.
Looks like this is yet another area where I will have a chance to learn more than I ever wanted to know. I’ll keep you posted.
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Recent Items Mentioned:
Inbox Zero: One of the guideposts along the way will be some articles from the excellent site for personal productivity at 43 Folders , specifically an article entitled “My email diet” in the Inbox Zero – Day 1series.
From the 43Folders Inbox Zero process, I’m learning that these tools are no substitute for ruthless triage of escalating questions:
1. What does this message mean to me and why do I care ?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me ?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains ?
These questions were most valuable getting from 400 to 100 items. After that, the default
Outlook folder “Unread Items” kept the new stuff in one place – just reading headers and sender lines for easy zapping
The free 40 page downloadable e-Book from Rajesh Setty, a fellow Gnomedexer.. “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals”, It’s some heavy reality for anyone in the technology arena – especially the IT field or pure technologists.
Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable.
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