Chinese “hackers” are able to purchase WPA and WEP cracking devices for about $25, according to reports in Techworld. They will crack WEP key encryption in a few minutes. One of the applications is called spoonwep. Here are some details. They are USB based devices.It will only be a matter of time before hackers start sniffing your WEP/ WPA networks.Guru
Femtocell technology used to extend Cell/Mobile phone reception to dead spots is being put forward as the next great solution for communications. Vodafone already have a system called Vodafone Sure Signal and O2 are trialling their solution. This is however little different from voice over IP, such as the SIP protocol, using local WiFi base stations. Both solutions need a broadband Internet connection, but the solutions by the mobile phone companies is likely to be proprietory to their own networks. Unless standards are introduced it will just promote vendor lock in. All that this provides is the opportunity for the owner of the Femtocell device to pay for rectifying the shortfall of the Mobile Phone Company coverage.
If you need information on deployment of Femocells there is a guide here. Here is an example of the equipment from Airvana.
Guru
In a recent expansion of Telecity’s datacentres to Powergate in North London they used Geo to provide fibre through the sewers. Given that one of COLT’s major hubs is located in Powergate one wonders if Telecity made use of COLT fibre as well as Geo.
Guru
I recently had to deal with a situation where a friend was trying to maintain his on-line shop, or what is now called e-commerce. He was using a service supplier to provide these facilities (SaaS software as a service). His problem was that when he tried to maintain the records for the shop, such as products or product stock levels he was finding that he had to constantly re-enter his login authentication details. The timing of this was not predictable it was in effect erratic. It could be mid-transaction or when swapping between screens.
A more alarming symptom of this problem was that when he logged into his shop as a test client he encountered the same problem. Shoppers who had to repeatedly log in to enter an order would soon lose faith and go find another supplier. It would be unlikely that the shop owner would know the cause.
The technical support team for the on-line shop were baffled. So far as they were concerned the system was working fine. I put my detective’s hat on and set to work. When I tried the system from my office and from my home there were no problems. When I tried it from my friend’s computer the problems returned. It was not browser linked; nor was it the firewall on the PC. After a while inspiration struck and I checked out his external firewall/router. I found that his firewall was set to load balance across two internet connection lines. If I turned off one external line the problem disappeared, in a repeatable fashion. My deduction was that the host software of the e-commerce system must be tracking the IP address of the remote user. When the IP address changed, under load balancing across two ports, the system considered that the remote user was not properly authenticated.
Small business users and consumers don’t often use dual internet line load balancing, but this is likely to become increasingly common as businesses increasingly depend on their network connection.
The service provider should have tested for this type of user configuration and made sure that their logic allowed for that to happen. The problem appears to be handled by the on-line banking and other large e-commerce systems without too much effort. After all the whole point about the Internet protocol is that data paths can be diversely routed. Clearly the testing environment of the supplier needs some enhancement.
Guru
One of my company Internet links is down due to the incompetence of BT OpenReach. Fortunately we have diverse links from two suppliers so we are not dead in the water. The existing link had an horrendous error rate, so after several engineer visits and a full equipment swap out the ISP (Easynet) decided to pay BT to install a new line to the premises.
The BT Openreach engineer turned up the day after the agreed date without prior notification and installed the new line. After disconnecting the old line he then discovered that the preparatory work at the exchange had not taken place. So now we are waiting and as yet no Ready For Service date.
This negligent approach to works by BT OpenReach shows a corporate disrespect for the end-customer. It is a simple line installation which if properly organised should have been straightforward and error free.
BT are not going to get away with this disrespect. My company advises financial organisations on IT Infrastructure and we often see opportunities to improve our client’s service levels and reduce their costs by finding alternative suppliers. This advice often results in the removal or downgrading of an existing supplier. In a recent case one company we advised diverted all of their outgoing call traffic to an alternative supplier. There was no capital spend to achieve this and it halved their operational costs for call charges. At the same time we managed to double their resilience of their telecoms infrastructure.
You’ve guessed it of course. The incumbent supplier had previously annoyed our consultant. We didn’t charge our client any extra for this advice and they have saved a lot of money.
In the days when Account Managers were real people who met their clients, rather than spotty clerks sitting in a Call Centre with a CRM system, this might have been resolved amicably. We would have called a friendly account manager and warned him/her of the costly outcome of corporate negligence. Some Bean Counter somewhere probably “saved” a load of money by reducing the account managers and moving the function to a call centre. It all boils down to really knowing your customer.
Guru
My 25 year old daughter has flown the nest of the family home. She has her own career and her own home some 15 miles away from Lewisham in South East London. When vandals struck at the local power supply sub-station they took out the power to 60,000 people. My daughter was without power in her home for 4 solid days. She was able to come and stay back in her old bedroom, so the power outage did not affect her too much. She had a standby arrangement.
I wondered how well the local businesses fared with the power outage? Network connectivity dubious, no power for servers for 4 days, even charging mobile phones was a problem if you were stuck in the the location of the outage.
I wonder did any of the businesses what they would do in the event of a regional power outage. Rehearsal and problem analysis is an essential part of the BCP process for those businesses. It is bad for customer relations if you don’t have effective BCP, but conversely your company will stand out if it continues its operations in the face of a regional outage.
I’ve just received a notification from my supplier of 0871 phone numbers. New rules start on 1st August 2009.
In other words all of these companies who make money by holding the public in long call queues will now find that the situation is reversed. The call queue will cost their company money. How many of these companies will have changed their adverts, websites and gained new support phone numbers in time?
Interesting times ahead.
Guru
Google voice is starting to hit the world. This is the start of a new era for voice telecoms, but at present it is only North America receiving the service. Skype should have done this, but since being taken over by Ebay it has lacked impetus. Meg really did pay too much. About 18 months ago I predicted that the home PC would largely disappear to howls of protest from the Geek Brigade. However this Google step is just another step along the path of thin devices in the home. Who wants the hassle of maintaining a PC at home?
Guru