Fourth US airline to go Wi-Fi: Aircell says they have a fourth airline--after American, Delta, and Virgin America--on board for its in-flight Wi-Fi service. The aerial broadband provider's latest partner will be announced soon. Aircell's service went live in 15 American Airlines planes two weeks ago, and there's been a surprising lack of reporting from regular travelers or journalists since the big splash at the launch.

Microsoft, two universities research methods for better Wi-Fi handoff for vehicles: The researchers developed a method they call Vi-Fi, writes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, which allows a system to maintain connections with several base stations at once, using a primary access point for traffic until a discontinuity is predicted or encountered. This allows seamless handoffs and continuous voice conversations.

Speaking of autos and Wi-Fi, concerns raised about Chrysler's in-car Wi-Fi option: Randall Stross wrote nearly two weeks ago in The New York Times about the problem of distraction. With the Internet at your fingertips, can you restrain yourself? The only problem with the humorous and accurate analysis is that millions of business travelers have 3G access via laptop cards already, so you'd think we'd already be seeing the bad effects of automotive area networks.

A Wi-Fi booster can't post availability signs on highway: The Nebraska town of Louisville has free Wi-Fi downtown, and wanted to post "Visitor Wi-Fi" on a highway sign as another amenity. The state highway department has a policy that doesn't allow the promotion of Wi-Fi, because they believe they'd be inundated. A resident who runs a local Internet firm installed his own signs on the highway; the roads department removed them; he remounted them; they were removed again. The idea of zoning and mounting a billboard apparently hasn't come to the city officials' minds (or perhaps they're prohibited).

The folks spreading misinformation about Wi-Fi health effects cause Ulster school to disable network: I can understand why non-technical folks might think that Wi-Fi has been proven to be unsafe, given the kind of information that's available on the Internet about wireless safety. While there are ongoing studies about the safety of cellular signals--and I'm convinced at this point there's no increased risk to an adult's health by using a cell phone--there is no specific and credible research linked to Wi-Fi, which broadcasts signals at a far lower level than a cell phone, most of the time in most uses.

Washington state shuts down rest-area Wi-Fi: The $3 for 15 minutes, $7 per day, or $30 per month Wi-Fi service at 28 of Washington's 42 rest areas has been turned off after a year for lack of use. Figures. The fees charged by Parsons and Road Connect aren't unreasonable for a nationally scoped plan, but are ridiculous for limited use. States should either bite the bullet and offer these service for free, partner with national roaming operators who can resell service into large networks of business travelers, or use ads to support the service. Highways in remote areas can typically pick up cell data networks, and ongoing costs should be minimal to operate such networks.

IEEE approves fast-roaming standard, 802.11r: This new standard is designed to improve the handoff of devices between base stations. This is accomplished in part by allowing base stations to communicate security and quality of service information so that a VoIP over WLAN phone can immediately reassociate without the delay of authentication and other handshaking.

Denver airport sees 7,000 connections on a single day last week due to Democratic National Convention: FreeFi released the usage figures recently to show how their service is operating. The network started with about 600 daily users when the switchover from fee to free happened 10 months ago, and now carries about 3,500 daily connections.

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf goes free: The chain of about 700 cafes will have free Wi-Fi installed by now in all its company-owned stores (about 300).

The TSA's useless photo ID rules

No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don't work.

By Bruce Schneier

August 28, 2008

The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government's no-fly list -- the list that is supposed to keep our planes safe from terrorists -- could just fly with no ID.

Now, people without ID must also answer personal questions from their credit history to ascertain their identity. The TSA will keep records of who those ID-less people are, too, in case they're trying to probe the system.

This may seem like an improvement, except that the photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

The problem is that it is unverified passenger names that get checked against the no-fly list. At security checkpoints, the TSA just matches IDs to whatever is printed on the boarding passes. The airline checks boarding passes against tickets when people board the plane. But because no one checks ticketed names against IDs, the security breaks down.

This vulnerability isn't new. It isn't even subtle. I first wrote about it in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google "print your own boarding pass" can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren't so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That's just not true. The no-fly list -- a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can't arrest them -- and the less dangerous "watch list" contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren't that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives. It catches innocents such as Ted Kennedy, whose name is similar to someone's on the list, and Islam Yusuf (formerly Cat Stevens), who was on the list but no one knew why.

The no-fly list is a Kafkaesque nightmare for the thousands of innocent Americans who are harassed and detained every time they fly. Put on the list by unidentified government officials, they can't get off. They can't challenge the TSA about their status or prove their innocence. (The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided this month that no-fly passengers can sue the FBI, but that strategy hasn't been tried yet.)

But even if these lists were complete and accurate, they wouldn't work. Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the D.C. snipers, the London subway bombers and most of the 9/11 terrorists weren't on any list before they committed their terrorist acts. And if a terrorist wants to know if he's on a list, the TSA has approved a convenient, $100 service that allows him to figure it out: the Clear program, which issues IDs to "trusted travelers" to speed them through security lines. Just apply for a Clear card; if you get one, you're not on the list.

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can't. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response -- security measures that aren't based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That's the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

As we get closer to the conference dates, I wish that I had made plans to fly back to the US to meet everyone.    However, I have been cutting back on public speaking, taking a break since May.  In addition, Gartner did not ask me to speak at their Event Processing Summit this year, I assume because they did not want to pay airfare for my flight from Thailand to the US.    Also, Gartner always likes to fill their conference speaking slots with as many Gartner speakers as they can, unless you are a paid sponsor; and I noticed a number of Gartner employees speaking in multiple slots.

(Editorial Note) Then again, maybe I complained to much about the lack of organization and conference problems when I was invited at be a Gartner keynote speaker last time - reservations not made propertly,  problems with the guest speaker registration list at sign-in, rooms shifted without notifying the speakers and panelists.   Admittedly, I was not happy with the conference organizers at the last get together.  This was my fault, as I am accustomed to better conference execution and am probally too “picky” about details these days - my bad.  Anyway, the Gartner organizers apologized numerous times, saying they had too many conferences going on at the same time and not enough people to cover them all.

One of the problems with spending so much time in Asia, especially in Thailand, is that guest speakers are really treated as VIPs.  There are usually special comfy couches set up for the speakers and the conference staff really treat you very nice, taking care of you every step of the way.   In fact, there is an entire very nice culture around how guest speakers are treated in Thailand.   Often, they pin flowers on the VIP speakers and take your photos like you are a star.    Very nice culture.

I absolutely look forward to speaking on event processing or CEP at a future venue and meeting everyone face-to-face instead of over the net.  My sincere and deepest apologies for not attending either the Gartner or the EPTS event this year.   

PS:  If you take up a collection and send me a RT business class air ticket, I might change my mind

A plane was forced to land when a passenger had an extreme allergic reaction to a leaking jar of mushroom soup, it was revealed today.

The soup fell on the man from an overhead locker on a Ryanair flight to Dublin from Budapest.

He reportedly suffered allergic swelling in his neck and struggled to breathe, forcing staff to seek emergency medical treatment.

This is a big day for Aircell, which spent tens of millions to acquire the exclusive spectrum license that allows them to shoot Mbps to and from planes. My big question will be whether coverage remains seamless across an entire flight--how often one has to reconnect their VPN would be a big issue. If Aircell has architected the network correctly, passengers should never be reassigned an IP address, and connections shouldn't be dropped even if there's a hiccup in air-to-ground communication.

I've covered in-flight broadband for several years, and I've been wondering lately whether we'd be waiting until 2009 to see real production service. American is calling this a 3-to-6 month pilot to see what their passengers think. Just yesterday, I wrote up veteran travel writer Joe Brancatelli's frustration with the lack of information and some misinformation about in-flight broadband.

You can read more background on American's plans and Aircell's technology in a post I wrote for BoingBoing on 24-June-2008.

He's not very positive about it, because his research shows a mismatch between claims and work. He writes that an unnamed American airline executive is frustrated by the delay in launching the 3-to-6 month pilot on their trans-continental fleet; that Aircell hasn't submitted paperwork for Virgin's Airbus models for certification; and that the FAA just received a request to certify Delta's MD-80 craft, which makes a launch with 75 planes this year on that airline less likely.

Competitor Row 44 doesn't fare better in his analysis, as they promised spring and summer 2008 tests that still haven't happened, with Southwest and Alaska Airlines.

I'm a little more positive about the future of in-flight broadband. There's no particular conspiracy. It's hard to make it work. Development and testing is tricky due to FAA limits, and getting in-flight handoffs to work for seamless service at 35,000 feet is far more difficult than, say, cellular handoffs in a moving car at 100 feet above sea level. My suspicion is that tuning the service to be entirely reliable at launch is what's taking so long.

Brancatelli blames the high price of Connexion on its failure, but I don't think the $27 fee for long-haul flights deterred users. Lufthansa, which deployed all its long-haul fleet, apparently had very good usage. Most other airlines had few craft equipped, which didn't allow business travelers, able to expense several hours of work for a $27 fee, the reliability of having on-board Internet when they needed it. Connexion also had many reports of spotty service in certain areas.

Connexion's failure came from deploying technology that was old when it was deployed, which weighed too much, and which was too expensive to install. Connexion's revenue and expenses were forecast based on having several hundred aircraft with Connexion service--recall that it was supposed to be a domestic U.S. service, too. In the end they had about 100, I believe.

Brancatelli is also modest when he says Boeing "lost" $300m. That's part of what they wrote down. My sources say they spent more than a billion in R&D, transponder leases, ground station operation, airline incentives, and payoffs at the end.

You can read plenty of other blogs about some of the great presentations at Black Hat.  So I thought I would take another angle and talk about some of the other stuff that may be important to you.

1.  secure@microsoft.com – This years hottest party was again the Microsoft party.  This year it was at the LAX club in the Luxor.  As usual there were quite a number of people at the door who thought they could talk their way in or worse yet were told they “were one the list”.  I was happy to be able to go and saw many of the usual suspects there as well. I had to leave the party early to go catch my red eye flight home, so went right to the airport from the party.  As I wrote earlier, Microsoft is trying really hard on security.  But I couldn’t help but notice the irony of this grainy, lousy picture of the DJ booth at the party.  If you can, notice the computers that the secure@microsoft.com DJs are using. That’s right they are Macs!

2. A new low for booth babes – What would a Shimel review of a trade show be without a booth babe rant.  Hey I recognize it is Vegas and all, but EdgeOS went way over the line this year.  A booth babe dressed as a Las Vegas showgirl or some other type of costume makes a statement.  I personally don’t like exploiting woman to make that statement, but I understand.  However, these guys had woman who were dressed so raunchy and classless, that I could not bring myself to post a picture of them.  Come on guys!  You want to resort to the booth babe thing (and BTW I think the Black Hat crowd does not respond to that), at least have a little class.  These girls looked like street walkers and do you and your company no favors.  Is that really the image you want to promote?  Grow up!

3.  The Security Bloggers Network – We are back!  With the end of the Black Hat show, the SBN is going back to being the SBN.  The old logo is back and our promotion with Black Hat is at an end.  However, I want to personally thank so many of you SBN members who blogged about Black Hat.  The Black Hat marketing folks made it a point to come over to me and thank us for the overwhelming support and help of the community.  Our network delivered big time with them and they are already thinking about ways we can work together next year.  I will keep you all posted on that.

We have several new promotions we are working on with the SBN and will have more on that soon. Also, we learned some valuable lessons.  Next time we will work with the network members more closely in doing these affiliations.  Also, for any show like this we need to have an official bloggers get together.  Not because we don’t want to buy our own drinks (thanks to Chris Hoff for doing more than his share in picking up a big bar tab), but frankly we need to reserve a place that has enough space for us.  Security bloggers are big time. We have a great community of people who get together. Lets make it better.

I have some other ideas around the SBN I am working on too and want to form a committee to help. If you are a member and want to get involved, please drop me a line or comment.

Anyway, another year of Black Hat is in the books. It was a good one and I can’t wait until next year!

Delta's competitors with broadband interest, like Alaska, Southwest, and American, each have a different plan of attack. Alaska will test service soon with Row 44, which uses Ku-band satellite access, albeit with higher speeds and far lower costs, the company says, than Boeing's doomed Connexion service. Row 44 touts their over-water ability, critical for Alaska, which flies plenty of routes to the great northern state and to Mexico. A test is what's scheduled; not deployment.

Southwest did some deal with Row 44, but nothing further has been forthcoming. Summer's almost over, and we haven't heard more about the "four aircraft" mentioned in the linked press release.

American has the most fully formed plan, but they, too, are testing Aircell's service, and will shortly launch service on 15 trans-continental 767-200s, flying largely routes among SFO, LAX, JFK, and Miami. The company said in the past that they would decide on fleet deployment after the pilot stage.

I shouldn't forget Virgin America, which planned Internet access as part of a set of already-deployed in-flight networked services, but they have under a couple dozen planes at the moment, so they're not a real competitor except on a few routes. Their launch date hasn't been set.

Delta's announcement makes it clear that air-Fi is coming soon, and will likely change how business travelers plan trips. If you can get productive work done during a flight, that changes the financial equation of the trip's cost, and your time out of the office. Pair in-flight Wi-Fi with a cell data card, and you may curse the fact that you're always connected.

One of my favorite banks in Thailand is K-Bank. With K-Bank I can simply walk up to an ATM machine and pay a mobile phone bill, purchase mutual funds, buy insurance, or transact an ever-growing list of services payable at the modern and sleek K-Bank ATM.

For example, tomorrow I fly to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and found K-Bank’s service amazingly better than in the US. For example, I booked my flight as usual (over the phone, but could have used the Internet) and told the reservation agent I was going to pay by ATM. He simply gave me a PayCode and told me I had three hours to go to the ATM and enter the PayCode to perfect my reservation.  I also got the PayCode via SMS.  This gave me the time I needed to make sure I had booked the perfect boutique hotel in Chiang Mai, the Fern Paradise.

Then, I went out into the beautiful Thai weather and completely my airplane reservation at the ATM machine; which also printed out a receipt with my flight details and reservation number.

It sometimes amazes me how much further advanced some services are in Thailand compared to the US. To me, it feels more secure not to use an on-line payment center or give out my credit card details over the phone. I can simply book a ticket, take a PayCode, and complete the transaction at a nice modern, shiny, K-Bank ATM machine.

Who knows, maybe soon I can select the perfect window seat at the ATM and the receipt will act as my boarding pass!