GOING WIRELESS

My perspective is from living in Jerusalem. It must be much the same in America, Canada, most of Europe, and major cities in Asia.

For many people, coffee just isn’t coffee without a pastry. If you have a laptop computer, coffee just isn’t coffee if the coffee shop does not provide what has become a basic amenity – wireless Internet access.

Those WiFi radio waves are everywhere these days. You can walk down the street and pass literally dozens of wireless networks, set up by businesses and local residents who are able to freely roam around, clicking away at web sites and merrily answering their email.

In Israel’s major cities, in malls, downtown areas, hotels, hospitals, caf�s and even falafel joints (something like hamburger stands), all you have to do is turn on your laptop’s wireless detection program and search for access points.

Downtown Jerusalem is wired and you can check out a municipal web site for the areas covered. I expect this is true in most western cities.

But without a map or other indication, you have to go through a whole ritual to determine whether you’ve picked the right caf� or restaurant for a WiFi connection unless the place posts a sign. (In Jerusalem, they usually don’t.)

Turn on the laptop, log onto your account, open up your browser – you have to go through a whole rigmarole to figure out whether the location you’ve chosen is the right one. Besides being annoying, you use up valuable laptop battery time turning your computer on and off.

With the nifty Kensington WiFi Finder Plus , however, you don’t have to go through the wireless guessing game in order to get a connection going.

You can carry this little $30 device on a keychain and wave it around in your search for publicly available connections – it will indicate whether there are wireless networks in the area, and how strong they are.

One problem with many WiFi indicators is that they confuse WiFi signals with those of 2.4 ghz phones, cell phones and microwave ovens, all of which crowd the wireless spectrum with similar signals. The WiFi Finder Plus is able to differentiate between signals, though, so you’ll be able to make sure you’re at the right shwarma stand before ordering. Just keep the hummus off the keyboard.

The great wide open
Israelis love toys, and in many places, folks who have ADSL have set up wireless routers – which also allow you to connect regular wired computers – as their router of first choice, even if they don’t have a laptop. Nowadays, routers capable of supporting wireless connections are cheap and easy to set up, and have more or less pushed old-school wired routers out of the consumer market.

How popular are wireless routers? One fellow in Ramat Hasharon has begun mapping connections in his town and has come up with some 600 WiFi "hotspots" – places where you can hook into a wireless connection.

And nearly three quarters of those connections are "unsecured," which means that anyone can use them just by opening up their computer and connecting. The main security protocol for wireless connections – known as WEP (Wireless Equivalency Protocol) – is built into all home wireless routers, and provides some level of security and privacy by making users log in with a password.

If you’re a "wireless leech" looking for free Internet connections, this works out just fine – but if you have your own wireless network, watch out, because you can lose your ability to connect smoothly (if your unwelcome guest seizes a large part of your bandwidth).

Even your freedom, as in a number of cases in the US and Britain, where leechers used unwitting hosts’ connections for illicit purposes, causing unwitting hosts to be arrested and brought up on charges of abetting a crime.

Are you at risk? Well, if your connection’s WEP isn’t set up properly, then you are most definitely a potential victim of a WiFi kidnapping.

Check out Microsoft homewireless security for some tips and ideas on how to "harden" your connections and ensure unwelcome pests stay off the line.

If you want to check out the nuts and bolts of wireless security protection, download Ethereal , a free tool that will show you what the "bad guys" can really see on your network.

Keeping your WiFi work safe and secure
Once you’re on the network – even a secured one – you have another problem, and that is keeping your Internet communications safe from prying eyes.

WiFi has turned out to be a hacker’s paradise; unlike with wired networks, you don’t need to be connected by wire to a computer, directly or indirectly, in order to "invade" a system. With wireless, a determined hacker could tap into the radio signals as your computer collects them.

A "radio hacker," for example, can’t change the record playing in the studio and can’t remotely change the station on your radio – but they can listen to the same station you’re listening to on their own radio. Same thing here; the data on the server is (hopefully) protected, and the data on your hard drive is protected by your firewall or other security system.

But while you’re downloading your data from the Internet wirelessly, you’re vulnerable. And because so many wireless networks are unprotected, hackers looking for free wireless connections often park themselves outside homes or businesses that have "open" wireless connections.

With the right kind of scanner, a hacker could tap into your data line and check out whatever it is you’re working on. Now, while most hackers won’t bother with your e-mail or web surfing, you may have an unwelcome eavesdropper if the hacker sees you sitting in a cafe’ poring over your bank statements while you tap away at your laptop.

I always sit in a position where others cannot casually see what I’m working on.
Note that this has nothing to do with whether you use WEP, which many experts say is not 100 percent secure anyway, and only works as data is received by your computer.

And while there’s little you can do when communicating with public servers, you can protect the valuable data on your company’s system by using an end-to-end data encryption system like the one made by Seclarity , which encrypts data at its source and only decrypts it when it is picked up by your computer.

The system consists of encryption software that runs on a server, and a network card that you attach to your laptop (or desktop) that keeps your secret data secret. It’s not necessarily a cheap system (the software and hardware run into several hundred dollars), but if you want the convenience of sitting on the terrace to work instead of at your desk, it might just be worth it.

In truth, I do none of these things, and I haven’t run into any problems. However, I’m letting you know the problems potentially exist, and what you can do to ward them off.

Dennis Turner

Ps: I’m going talk about a special backup freebie next week, but right now here are some very useful tools you can download for free.

Some brief descriptions:

CLCL Ver 1.1.2
Clipboard Utility
NOTE: captures everything & highly configurable. No install – if you want it to start with Windows then add a program run command into your registry.
http://www.nakka.com/soft/index_eng.html

TreeCopy v1.11
copies a directory folder structure without the files – just the folders.
http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/treecopy/

Resize Browser v1.03
tray ulility for changing browser size for web site testing.
http://www.rjlsoftware.com/software/utility/resize/download.shtml

bxNewFolder
adds a ‘new folder’ ico/button to windows explorer.
NOTE : the elusive button that should have been standardized with Windows.
http://www.baxbex.com/files/bxnewfolder.exe

FolderBox 1.20
FolderBox displays additional folders in the lower part of Explorer, which enables your to display the contents of two folders at once.
NOTE : Turns Windows explorer into a decent file manager.
http://www.baxbex.com/files/folderbox.exe

ToolBox v2.22
Application launcher. Multiple Application Launcher windows. Unique ToolBox Control Panel to manage all your tool windows.
NOTE : maybe folk in the Tool Box would like this ?
http://www.cylog.org/utils_4.asp

Aren 2.0beta
batch file/folder renamer
NOTE : A great renamer – fast & simple & intuitive & works like you’d want a renamer to work !
http://www.hulubulu.dk/eng/

Switch 1.7
Skinnable Colour picker & zoomer
http://www.highertendencies.com/

Windows Error Generator
type in the error code & it explains what it means.
NOTE : pretty useful for bug tracking.
http://www.netdevel.net.nz/index.php?mod1=netdevel/software

Shell Object Editor
This program is an editor for shell objects. The "My Documents" folder is a shell object. It is a special shell object, a shell folder. Shell folders are not real folders on your hard disk,they only refer to real folders. They are a kind of "hard links", a special type of shortcuts.
NOTE : Excellent proggie for systems with huge disks.
http://www.tropictech.de/

PlacesBar Editor v1.0
PlacesBar Editor lets you customize the PlacesBar, the list of up to 5 folder shortcut buttons on the left side of the Open and Save dialogs in most applications in Windows 2000 and Windows ME.
NOTE : This is a really useful tool.
http://www.maddogsw.com/index.html?products

Character Map Pro 2.00
NOTE : this is the perfect tool for seeing what your text will look like in Photoshop. Something that surprisingly wasn’t included in the CS version. There’s no install – just create a folder & unzip/unrar to it & make a shortcut (.ink). This tool really speeds up choosing the right font for the gFx you’re working on.
ftp://mydeskbbs.com/miscellaneous/charmp20.zip