Matt Matteson

I have got to recommend a backup application for a client of mine. Anyone have a favorite for Windows XP, just backing up data to an external HD. Free is good. Easy to use is good. Thanks!

something will have happened. I will be done with finals. I will have completed my junior year of college. Nice.

I just wanted to do a quick check in with you folks. Test tomorrow in Statistics, I’m feeling alright about her. Raced in Colorado Springs last weekend and would love to tell you a bunch about it.

Monday was a lame day of doing a group project, but had a great dinner with Alex. Tuesday I slept in, then had a nice muddy mountain bike ride with Nathan. Then a long entertaining dinner at Woody’s with Derek and his friend Brandon. Wednesday was a normal day of class, then got some more mountain biking in with Brady. On the way back to my house I ran into Phil and he met me down at Qdoba for some dinner. After my test tomorrow and some work it’ll be a good weekend.

I didn’t plan on going mountain biking today, just invited Brady for a road ride. The kid was taking a long mountain bike route to his evening plans. I followed and got dragged up Chimney Gulch and flew down Apex. I am amazed how much better I have gotten on handling my bike, and how much confidence my Trek has given me. I am still hoping to learn a lot more on handling the bike.

Alright, they are kicking me out of the library, like usual. The library is like a second, err more like a first home to me. It has a good internet connection, and usually some company.

Hasta.

Welcome to Thursday. I survived a over-academic Wednesday to get here.

As the title might hint I am attending a session at the 59th Conference on World Affairs. The reason I came up to Boulder is I really enjoy the writing and speaking of Andy Ihnatko. I’m listening to the panel right now, and I just told Nick “It’s good, Andy is awesome. The other people sitting on the panel have goo resumé but not so entertaining.” For those of you taking note, the session I am attending is “Digital Disobedience: Bad Things You Can Do Online.”

While I’m up here I had a great lunch with Chris Mulvany, a buddy of mine from high school.

We’ll see what the afternoon holds.

My housemate Andrew recently wrote about his trip to the airport. He linked to an article detailing how the “Free Public Wifi” networks you see around are a scam. I would like to take a moment and help you out. I will tell you why Andrew’s post, the ComputerWorld.com article, and the Slashdot article Andrew found the link on are all misleading.

Here is the first comment I posted concerning the wireless networks you see.

Free Public Wifi is not a scam, it is a part of Ad-Hoc networking. See this blog post
or this tuaw.com post.
“It seems that our friends in Redmond have (since Jan 06) some strangeness in the wireless network management routines under XP; any WLAN that a Windows machine joins gets ‘echoed’ back out as an ad-hoc SSID if the machine can’t find the previous connection (an implementation of RFC 3927).” - Tuaw.com

Andrew than explained it still could be a scam. Which is true, any network could be a scam. Heck, anything could be a scam. I decided to comment on the article he agreed with. The article is Don’t fall victim to the ‘Free Wi-Fi’ scam - Computerworld.com.

The article you link too is terribly written.
From the computerworld.com article:

But because you’re using his connection, all your traffic goes through his PC, so he can see everything you do online, including all the usernames and passwords you enter for financial and other Web sites.

This is not true. The attacker cannot see everything you send. Plenty of data you send is easily sniffable on a wireless (or even wired network.) You should NEVER enter important information into a website without encryption. If it is encrypted (lock in the corner for web browsers) it is close to impossible to get that information. The information the article says you are giving away is visible even if you join a network the attacker is also connected (including most wireless networks and some wired.)

From the computerworld.com article:

In addition, because you’ve directly connected to the attack PC on a peer-to-peer basis, if you’ve set up your PC to allow file sharing, the attacker can have complete run of your PC, stealing files and data and planting malware on it.

This again is very misleading. Simply having file sharing on will not allow complete run of your PC, or let someone else install software. Although if you setup file sharing, you should ALWAYS have a password. You are no more insecure by connecting to this wifi ’scam’ then again being on ANY wireless network with the attacker.

Andrew’s post quotes a Slashdot post the believe the article is “a story from Computerworld about a rather simple scam that has been observed in the wild in several US airports.” This is a classic Slashdot post, where there is NO information and a lot of misinformation. Read the article, the article mentions “It found more than 20 ad hoc networks each time, with 80% of them advertising free Wi-Fi access.” No where does the article say ANYONE has had issues or any of these possible outcomes happen. As per my first reply concerning how XP’s wifi operates, it is not amazing at all he saw more than 20 of the networks. Would you be surprised to hear there may be more than 20 laptops at the airport?

Know your sources, trust wisely.