URLs du Jour (11/10/2005)

  • La Shawn Barber has an excellent mini-essay that should remind us not to take TCP/IP and associated protocols for granted.

    At the risk of sounding corny or melodramatic, I'll confess that the power of an awesome, expanding, and evolving invention like the Internet (in my lifetime) leaves me breathless.

    Me too. OK, we don't have the flying cars, or everyday space travel, or robotic servants, or any number of other things promised in my youth. But if we weren't the kind of creatures that can take anything for granted, we'd be constantly slackjawed-awed by the Internet and the Web, every darn day.

  • As just one minor example of the wonderfulness of the Internet: anytime you notice anyone taking Jeremy Rifkin seriously, you can just point them to a list of his wildly wrong predictions. (Via Clayton Cramer.)
  • On the other hand, the Internet may be wonderful, but even after years of experience people using it make the same old security mistakes. Writing in Infoworld, Roger Grimes reports on a friend who habitually uses an off-the-shelf password sniffer when travelling.

    She said about half the hotels use shared network media (i.e., a hub versus an Ethernet switch), so any plain text password you transmit is sniffable by any like-minded person in the hotel. Most wireless access points are shared media as well; even networks requiring a WEP key often allow the common users to sniff each other.s passwords.

    She said the average number of passwords collected in an overnight hotel stay was 118, if you throw out the 50 percent of connections that used an Ethernet switch and did not broadcast passwords.

    Three words … no, three letters: S. S. H. (Via Bruce Schneier.)


Last Modified 2012-10-26 5:42 AM EDT