Monday, September 4. 2006security methods and lifeThis evening I read an article about using an appealing car as bait in order to catch criminals carjacking. The report quotes that there is nearly 100% success rate in convicting the theif because there is live footage from within the car. I noticed that this type of strategy was very familiar to the honeypot, a term in computer security which describes a setup to entrap a would be attacker. I know how the media likes to exaggerate on tech issues, but is this really such a cutting edge breakthrough? It would surprise me if it was, because these concepts have been around for a long time. Furthermore, we know that there are security concepts which are modelled from real life, such as Intrusion Detection Systems, analogous to a house alarm, but what other adaptations have been taken from the computing world? Perhaps there are still even more methods which haven’t been used by the police and other authorities to catch criminals, but are common practice within the IT community. Monday, September 4. 2006Is There One Sane DSL Router?Saturday night our DSL router died. The LEDs simply went off and even loud cursing and bashing against the wall didn't reanimate it. I'd like to forget about this piece of hardware as soon as possible anyways, so R.I.P Belkin. But please, never buy a Belkin router. I had to reboot mine every now and then, since I simply couldn't ping or reach it anymore. Also, the reallife bandwidth of this 54mbit wave-lan access point was a joke and competed with good old 10mbit coax. So off to PC World and just get a new DSL router, right? That's what I thought. At first I came home with a shiny new Linksys WRT54GS. Luckily RJ discovered that a broadband router isn't necessarily able to connect via broadband before we opened the box. Their concept of broadband routing is to connect this Linksys to your DSL/Cable Modem - which we don't have. It was supposed to be in the router, that's why it's called broadband router. So back to PC World, returned the Linksys and bought a D-Link DSL-G624T. It features a real DSL-modem, that's the upside. It even runs a proper Linux kernel and BusyBox. That's another plus on my checklist. It even comes with proper QOS and ADSL2+ support. I'm impressed. But then it started... already the installation was weird. First of all, half of the D-Link's web-interface is not functional with Firefox. It is slightly better with Konqueror and Opera seems to work for 90% of (the really extensive and featureful) web config. Seems to be a case of "Designed for Windows XP". Amusing when you know that it's driven by Linux  But ok we got a Windows Notebook connected to it, so we managed to deal with it. Strangely enough we couldn't connect with any other wave-lan devices to it, yet the access control was disabled. After a few reboots of all our devices it suddenly started working. Fingers crossed. But guess what? This device, just as the old Belkin that died, starts randomly shutting down the wave-lan port every now and then as well. Oh the joy of rebooting.Sigh. |
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