When I'm not traveling, I like to work from home some days rather than endure the trek from Seattle to Redmond (although it's much better now that our own employee transit service has expanded into my neighborhood -- the existence of which is sad commentary on the availability and reliability of Seattle's public transit companies).

This means, of course, that I need fast and stable network connections. Comcast with their PowerBoost is working very well for me. But I just can't find a decent wireless router at all. My Lenovo T61p (with Intel 4965abgn adapter) just won't stay connected to my D-Link DIR-628 and IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY! (Yes, I've tried various driver versions, from both Lenovo and Intel.)

My house is in an area with a lot of wireless activity -- sometimes I can see nine or ten SSIDs. I'm running draft N on 2.4GHz (which occupies two non-adjacent channels, currently 1 and 4), and I suspect the problem is collision interference. I could shift the router to 5.2GHz, which I probably would help, but then the rest of the computers in my house won't connect. Why, you ask? Well get this: the DIR-628 is part of D-Link's RangeBooster N family. So I stayed in the family and got two DWA-542 adapters for the desktop computers. Yet they only do 2.4GHz! Silly me, I assumed that being in the same family means full support of the router's capabilities.

I'm very tempted to replace my router again -- and I'm thinking that the best option is to get one with dual radios. That way I can move my T61p to 5.2GHz and replace the desktop adapters, while still having single-channel 802.11b/g on 2.4GHz for the Wii and my PlayStation Portable.

Now my request: tell me about your experience with home routers. What do you really like, and why? What should I buy?

MI5 has concluded that there is no easy way to identify those who become involved in terrorism in Britain, according to a classified internal research document on radicalisation seen by the Guardian.

[...]

The main findings include:

• The majority are British nationals and the remainder, with a few exceptions, are here legally. Around half were born in the UK, with others migrating here later in life. Some of these fled traumatic experiences and oppressive regimes and claimed UK asylum, but more came to Britain to study or for family or economic reasons and became radicalised many years after arriving.

• Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. MI5 says there is evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.

• The "mad and bad" theory to explain why people turn to terrorism does not stand up, with no more evidence of mental illness or pathological personality traits found among British terrorists than is found in the general population.

• British-based terrorists are as ethnically diverse as the UK Muslim population, with individuals from Pakistani, Middle Eastern and Caucasian backgrounds. MI5 says assumptions cannot be made about suspects based on skin colour, ethnic heritage or nationality.

• Most UK terrorists are male, but women also play an important role. Sometimes they are aware of their husbands', brothers' or sons' activities, but do not object or try to stop them.

• While the majority are in their early to mid-20s when they become radicalised, a small but not insignificant minority first become involved in violent extremism at over the age of 30.

• Far from being lone individuals with no ties, the majority of those over 30 have steady relationships, and most have children. MI5 says this challenges the idea that terrorists are young men driven by sexual frustration and lured to "martyrdom" by the promise of beautiful virgins waiting for them in paradise. It is wrong to assume that someone with a wife and children is less likely to commit acts of terrorism.

• Those involved in British terrorism are not unintelligent or gullible, and nor are they more likely to be well-educated; their educational achievement ranges from total lack of qualifications to degree-level education. However, they are almost all employed in low-grade jobs.

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage... reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes' noses as handholds.

"The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers," one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. "They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder."

They harass innocents:

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government's defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there's one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government's terrorist "watch list."

It's easy to sneak by them:

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know."

Though he doesn't even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.

[...]

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as "J. Pierce Robinson" also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

And here's how to sneak lockpicks past them.

He’s a bit indignant that so much energy goes to sporting events like the Olympics rather than more important news that isn’t getting reported around the world.

This is in a year when tons of journalists are getting laid off.

This is in a year when there are tons of stories around the world that aren’t getting reported on.

Could we take half of those photographers and send them to Russia, for instance

Reminds me of a feeling I had back in college as an undergrad student studying social sciences and humanities, about the way my friends who were physicists interacted with the world. They were so awed by the stars, Mars, astrophysics, and it seemed to me interesting but altogether unimportant. They argued they may find something outside our planet that could help solve Earth-bound problems like disease, or find the origins of earth and humanity — but really they were doing it because they loved it. One of my friends had a good argument, though — there are enough people right now that we can specialize in what we care about, and there will still be others covering other topics. He could be a physicist and look into the universe’s origin, while I studied social interaction and writing, and our other friends looked into solving cancer or eradicating invasive plants in the native wetlands. We have to specialize, and there are enough of us to do it too.

I think it’s the same way in journalism — whether it’s sports, celebrity journalism, or coverage of politics and war, there are a lot of opportunities right now for journalists. Of course the business model is changing, and some old-schoolers won’t know how to roll with that, but generations change slowly; we’re learning.

Also, the Olympics is seen as more than a sporting event, it’s also a symbol of world competition and cooperation too — a way for countries to come together and share entertainment globally. I think that’s worth covering.

In the second post, Robert Scoble says there are plenty of great journalists but the public doesn’t care. In some ways I have to agree with that, but I don’t think it’s negative, necessarily. I had a conversation with someone the other day about world news reportage. He says, “I was just reading this story, but what does it matter to me if there’s a flood in some city in another country I’ll never visit and some farmer lost his sheep?” World news is only important when it’s relevant, so it’s no wonder that many people don’t care — if they don’t know much about the area, and it doesn’t affect them, they have no incentive to give it full attention. You can call that apathy, but I think it’s an important selectivity skill that humans have. We have to choose what to give priority to, so if nothing stands out as being particularly important, we just ignore it or gloss over it. Human nature…

Also I think the common person today just gets desensitized and doesn’t know where to turn their energy, when surrounded by so many crises. Either you focus on one specialty and do your best to work toward one cause in your life — and maybe that’s just in the course of your daily work — or you become a complete Attention-Deficit-Disorder case and bounce from one problem to the next, without knowing how to solve anything. That just causes a sense of bewilderment, despair, and either that bogs you down or eventually you get desensitized.

There’s a commenter on Scoble’s blog, Spencer, who talks about this generation’s apathy. There are so many people who want to blame today’s generation or the young generation for this “apathy” that they sense. But I see it as a survival mechanism that arises from the way information flows these days. We’re surrounded by crises, everyone wants us to know about them — the water shortage, global warming, death in Iraq, the national deficit. Okay, crisis, I get it. But no one gives a real clear idea on what any individual is really supposed to do to solve the problem. You can’t get involved with one global cause, without ignoring all the others, and if you do get involved it’s likely to become your life’s purpose. Most people are concerned with other things — their families, their work, personal development, their homes and futures, and really that’s enough to take up all their time.

I’m always amazed when I read about the early unionists. Emma Goldman for example, the activist who pushed for the 8-hr workday, and campaigned for free love in the early 1900s when women were still wearing corsets, used to work 16 hour factory days as a seamstress, then lead meetings late into the night. Today we lead cushy lives comparatively–8 hour days, plus commute and lunch, family time, dinner time, gym maybe, sleep… but it still doesn’t seem like we ever have enough energy and time.

What Emma had that most people today don’t, is a community living in the same conditions as herself, with clear goals about what they were campaigning for, and a cause that affected their own daily lives. Today, unionism and local activism is in much shorter supply, in part due to the many people who work fairly comfy desk jobs, and the problem that everyone has his own specialization, works in a cubicle, does his or her own thing. The problems we’re facing today in terms of global warming, global water shortage, aren’t the same kinds of problems that activists have fought for in the past, and there’s no clear road map for how to solve them. Our leaders sure aren’t leading the way.

What we do have, at least, is the Olympics, which is an age old symbol of international cooperation, play and competition…so, uh, go sports! As for full disclosure, I don’t actually have a TV and haven’t watched the Olympics in many years, but I do try taking short showers–does that help?

In fact, it’s not just great artists like Mr. Lucas and I starting up old projects, our honourable colleagues wearing the black hats have got the same idea. We have new victims reporting in, rumours abound of an auth system compromise at Citi, the Ombudsman is backlogged with months of disputed withdrawal cases, and some like Alain Job are even going to court.

One original contributor to the phantom case histories has just been hit by a second phantom withdrawal five years on and is chalking up another case in the files. While her new phantom is a bread-and-butter skim incident (a magstripe clone used in the far east), amongst this mass, true phantoms — the real mystery cases — are on the rise too. Two new victims with whom I have been corresponding very kindly offered to fund the hosting for the revamped site.

Let’s consider one of these mysteries. The McGaughey case has been reported in the media in Northern Ireland: dozens of withdrawals taking place over four weeks, totaling almost five thousand pounds, all within a ten mile radius of the McGaughey’s home. Summarised that way it looks like a classic first party fraud (couple short on cash withdraw money, then deny it later). But no-one in the family is short on cash, the McGaugheys look after their card details carefully, and have solid alibis at the time of many of the withdrawals, and the interlocking pattern of real and disputed withdrawals is such that any third party would have a hard time taking and returning the card (whether covertly or in collusion with the McGaugheys). No-one appears to have either the means or the motive.

Unusually the bank has been very cooperative, providing logs from their authorisation system (BASE24), including all of the cryptograms, input data and transaction parameters covering the affected transactions. Everything turns on the Application Transaction Counter (ATC), an on-card counter which increments with every transaction initiated. If an EMV chip can be fully cloned (secret keys and all), then it will have to submit an ATC value when transacting, and if used in parallel with the real card, it won’t be long before the same number pops up twice in the auth system, or large gaps in the sequence appear. The McGaughey’s ATC sequence appears to interlock perfectly: clearly the original card was used?

Of course logs can be misinterpreted (Badger) or even faked, auth systems may not work as expected, and customers may lie and cheat following all sorts of agendas; just around the corner the missing piece of the jigsaw may lie, which reveals the truth behind the case. And there is the totally separate matter of who should suffer the loss in the interim, whilst the truth remains unclear. Liability for disputed withdrawals is the most hotly contested issue of all.

phantomwithdrawals.com can’t do much more for the McGaugheys, but it can bear witness. Documenting the incidence of phantoms and the experiences of customers disputing them adds much needed transparency to the process, and helps researchers and experts seek out the really interesting cases.

Maybe we can lift the lid and discover the truth behind the “phantom menace” — everyone is united in that goal at least — but let’s also hope that Episode 2: Attack of the Clones has not yet started shooting!

Mike.

The trick to doing this is not to hardcode things like host, port, etc. for your SMTP server when you use System.Net.Mail to send mail. Instead, use the default ctor for SmtpClient as I've done in the code below.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    // note the use of the MailAddress class
    // this allows me to specify display names as well as email addresses
    MailAddress from = new MailAddress("admin@fabrikam.com", "Fabrikam Website");
    MailAddress to = new MailAddress("mari@fabrikam.com", "Mari Joyce");

    MailMessage msg = new MailMessage(from, to);
    msg.Subject  = "Testing 123";
    msg.Body = "This is only a test!";

    // note use of default ctor
    // this looks in config to figure out how to send mail
    new SmtpClient().Send(msg);
}

What you're telling .NET by using the default ctor for SmtpClient is, "please use my config file to figure out how to send mail". Now you can use the system.net/mailSettings/smtp section in config to specify the details of your mail server, and all of the code in your app that is written to use the default SmtpClient ctor will inherit these settings. Here's an example of what the config on a production server might look like (if you put passwords in your config files, be sure to encrypt those sections):

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <mailSettings>
      <smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
        <network host="mail.fabrikam.com"
                 port="25"
                 userName="WebsiteMailAccount"
                 password="whatever"/>
      </smtp>
    </mailSettings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

During development, I use different settings because I don't usually want to deal with the hassle of installing an SMTP server on my development box. Instead, I want email messages delivered as individual files in a directory on my hard drive (I always have a c:\mail directory on my development box for just this purpose):

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <mailSettings>
      <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">
        <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\mail"/>
      </smtp>
    </mailSettings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Now when I run the program above, I get a .EML file in my c:\mail directory:

Outlook Express is normally registered as the viewer for .EML files, so double-click the file to view it:

If you've never seen this method of simulating email before, I hope you find it as useful as I have. Happy coding!