It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.
Tag: wireless
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Free Nationwide Wireless?
According to the Wall Street Journal, the FCC in it’s December meeting will be looking at the possibility of requiring the winner of the upcoming spectrum auction to use a portion of it’s spectrum to provide free internet access. They would require filtering although the idea is that adults could get unfiltered access with verification. Large wireless networks (as you can imagine) are against the idea, but I wonder if it REALLY is the threat to them that they think.
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WPA and WPA2 cracked 100 times faster
The days of relying on WPA or WPA2 as your online layer of wireless security may be numbered. A new technique that makes use of NVIDIA’s newer GPU’s to do some of hte processing means that it’s possible to break “forgotten” keys about 100 times faster than was previously possible. This means a key could be broken in days or weeks instead of years. The distributed password recovery software is available here. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about WEP and WPA/WPA2 that we ought to rethink.
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Wiring
I’ve got a home project to run more network cable here lately and found techtoolsupply to be an interesting resource for network and other cabling supplies. I don’t recall who I ordered from last time, it’s been several years (and those big spools of cable last for years unless you do a LOT of cabling.) On other notes…. There are many very good do it yourself wiring resources from electrical like this link to network wiring. Many people think that wireless means that it’s just backwards to install network cabling. (I don’t know how many people told me “why don’t you just use wireless” when I mentioned that when we built I wanted to get cat5 cable installed.) Well – here goes – wired is 1)faster and 2) more secure – yes I’ve heard of WPA for wireless, but my wired lan is between 10 and 100 times faster than my current wireless (yes, I’m running 802.11b still and an upgrade to the wireless wouldn’t get it up to the same speed yet either. then my wired network would be 2-20 times faster. (Of course that’s best case – clear line of sight to the wireless access point.)
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Torbutton – firefox anonymity browser extension
I don’t know if anonymity is exactly acheived, but…. anyway not too long ago I explored/setup tor on my system to play around with, no real reason I suppose, but doing what I do it pays to be aware of many different kinds of software. Tor proxies web requests from your machine through a tunnel to another machine on the tor network – it could be nearby or far away, but it essentially prevents the destination site from knowing EXACTLY where you’re located and can prevent machines in the middle from logging your access (i.e. your isp, or a wireless access point owner.) The problem is – once it’s setup you have to turn it on by changing the proxy settings in your browser – tedious. Well, in comes torbutton, which is a firefox extension to enable routing through tor with the click of a mouse. (You do have to have it setup beforehand (tor and privoxy work well together for that.)
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Offline wikipedia revisited – fast offline wikipedia reader
I’ve mentioned offline wikipedia access before mainly because for all it’s flaws, wikipedia is probably the single largest, most comprehensive and best information resource out there. There may be other encyclopedias that are more accurate, but require subscription access… anyway for all the warts it’s a great resource. To many people though it comes as a great shock that we’re not plugged into the internet all the time.. (so many people say “why offline, that’s what makes wikipedia so good is that it’s current and if it’s not current it’s worthless.” When I was growing up we had an encyclopedia set from 1965, I grow up through the 70’s and 80’s and it was still VERY useful and there was very good information, now it may not have been “up to date” in many areas, but it was still informative and was right on a GREAT many things. I think if I manage to download wikipedia once a year I’ll get by on the “currency” of the information. Anyway… the main point is that many times internet access is 1)not reliable 2)not practical 3)not there….. For instance I do have wireless for the laptop, but don’t always hook up to wireless networks there are places here and there “bubbles” of access around town, but many of the places I go there just isn’t wireless internet available. Now I guess if I wanted to pay verizon another $60 a month that would increase I would have MORE pervasive access, but frankly…..
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WiFi signal hacks….
As long as there have been wireless networks there have been people trying to squeeze out just a bit more range… there was the cantenna and now there are other variations on trying to collect and improve the amount of signal getting to wireless adapters… here is just a sampling of what I’ve looked at (and expiremented with) lately… instructables how-to using seive… and another page along the same lines and for wireless hardware that is a bit more powerful… Keenan Systems sells engenius/senao wireless products that tend to have higher sensitivity/power output than the average linksys/dlink.
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Mac/Linux/Windows usb wireless adapter D-link DWL-G122
One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine…. it’s not as straightforward as just getting one that’s compatible with Windows…. well, after much searching I found the D-Link DWL-G122 802.11g Wireless USB adapter…. (Revision B it seems is the one to get…) Anyway, using a generic driver downloadable for the Mac it will work (from ralink http://www.ralinktech.com). On linux, you have choices (isn’t that the truth…) anyway, there is a native driver (from ralink for the RT2571W/RT2671 chipset) and there’s the rt2x00 driver project and it’s also possible (and fairly easy) to install the Windows driver via ndiswrapper.
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Wireless exploits coming to Metasploit 3…
and the script kiddies rejoiced… It reads as though Metasploit 3 will make it easier than ever for script kiddies everywhere to take full advantage of the local wireless hotspots. Of course, metasploit has it’s good uses by people legitimately testing systems that they are responsible for, for vulnerabilities. But, it does make it very easy for the less skilled to pull off some exploits.
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Apple Macbook pro and other wireless fixes
Do you remember the big bruhaha a month or so back about the “apple wireless vulnerability” that everybody picked apart because in the video taped demonstration they used a third party card…. EVEN though the demonstrators stated that the same vulnerability existed in Apple’s own driver some on the internet tore one reporter up over stating that because Apple denied being shown exploit code (slight semantic issue there…) Well… those driver vulnerabilities that must have not existed, were fixed today by Apple. Brian Krebs has the story, as well as incidents.org