New life for dead Tempe network? Another firm has expressed interest in buying the pennies on the dollar assets that remain of the former Kite Networks installation in Tempe from the firm that financed the venture as long as they can negotiate a new, more favorable deal with the city for mounting and removal rights. CTC, Inc., which the East Valley Tribune reports runs networks in the Kansas City, Mo., area, thinks there's an opportunity. The article notes that reception problems were due in part to the prevalence of stucco in Tempe, common in the southwest. Stucco walls layer plaster or other materials on a wire mesh for strength that turns a house into a bit of an accidental Faraday cage, partially shielding the home from electromagnetic radiation. (Could I go so far to say that Tempe's network could be a phoenix? Ouch.)

Wake up, you darn computer: Intel's new Remote Wake motherboards won't work with Wi-Fi, it's important to note. The feature, announced today, will let an incoming VoIP call (the articles all say "phone call over the Internet") to wake a computer, as long as the call comes from a particular source. Of course, the standard SIP protocol for VoIP doesn't have the kind of security and integrity that would allow this; Intel has to overcome the problem with network address translation that renders most computer unreachable from outside the local network without a separate service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn; and it will only work for computers connected via Ethernet to a local network, because Wi-Fi is off when a computer sleeps, while Ethernet can remain lightly active. I don't have the protocol details yet, but there's long been a Wake on LAN protocol that required support in a router, operating system, and Ethernet card; Intel may be leveraging this.

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Apollo Robbins won't say whether he's ever stolen anything in his life, but it's clear he could if he wanted to. Having grown up in Missouri with three half-brothers who were all involved in various criminal activities (one of them is in the witness protection program after testifying against former colleagues of his), the 34-year-old Robbins was indoctrinated at an early age into the finer aspects of pickpocketing and con games.

He eventually developed those skills into a successful career as a sleight-of-hand artist and performer in Las Vegas. His latest act, though, has him starring as a corporate security consultant. In this role, it is less his dexterous hands that appeals to his clients than his mastery of all aspects of criminal cons, grifts, and social-engineering ploys.

"When you're trying to steal something, you find the weakest link and work that," Robbins says. "Nowadays, as technology gets better and security systems get harder to break through, the weakest link in any system is the human running it."

Robbins founded his consulting operation, Whizmob Inc. (the name comes from the street term for a team of pickpockets working together), two years ago while still performing full-time.

After doing a show a few years back in which he pickpocketed Secret Service agents accompanying former president Jimmy Carter, the resulting publicity led several law-enforcement agencies and other groups to contact him about his techniques.

"At first, I'd refer them to security people I knew," says Robbins. "Then I realized that instead of being a referral service, I could capitalize on this."

It was a good time to get in on the act. Information security consulting, which barely existed in the mid '90s, has become an estimated $10 billion to $12 billion business as the need to protect sensitive information stored on computers and servers has become a more central concern.

Today, Robbins counts the N.F.L., TNT, and several Fortune 500 companies among his customers. He recently advised the N.F.L. on information security protection at this year's Super Bowl in Phoenix to combat the expected flow of thieves and con artists lured by all the deep-pocketed spectators coming to town.

His work included getting a major hotel to upgrade its WiFi security so that fake access programs known as Trojans couldn't extract valuable data and password information from unsuspecting guests' computers. And at the stadium where the game was held, Robbins and his team identified areas where pickpockets would most likely operate—specifically, places with lots of traffic where bumping into people would be customary, and easy access to exits for escape purposes.

Besides the shadier elements of Robbins' childhood, his father, a blind minister, instilled in him a strong sense of morality. "It was like living in two worlds," Robbins says.

In many ways, he still is living in two worlds, since he keeps in regular contact with some professional thieves he knows in order to stay abreast of the latest cons. (While he doesn't pay them, Robbins says that "a lot of these guys are really good at what they do but they can't exactly discuss it with a lot of people.") But increasingly, Robbins is spending time in the more staid settings of the corporations that hire him to vet their security systems.

"It's a good time to be in the business," he says.

Well, the website for the NASA Phoenix Lander at least.

From the Register:

Add the webpages for the Phoenix Mars Lander to the list of high-profile sites that have been hacked by script kiddies. Not once, but twice.

Security pros had to take down the University of Arizona-hosted site after hackers replaced the lead blog entry with graffiti that read “hacked by VITAL.” As if that wasn’t enough, members of the self-declared “sql loverz crew” redirected baffled visitors of the Phoenix mission’s official webpage and a companion site to a third-party destination. That page gave credit to hackers going by the names BLaSTER and Cr@zy_king.

Red is the color of the Martian surface, but it seems it also describes the faces of security pros responsible for the sites. Evidently, they had better things to do than vet their scripts for SQL-injection vulnerabilities. So these hackers were willing to step in and test the sites for them.

Pesky SQL Injection attacks abound and the script kiddies are loving ‘em.

Article Link

I started Wi-Fi Networking News under the less euphonious name 802.11b Networking News back in April 2001 after spending months researching what became a front-cover article in Circuits, the then-separate tech section of The New York Times. The first post is still live, as are all the nearly 4,800 others.

(I had help: Nancy Gohring wrote part-time for WNN for a couple years when we had a bit more traffic; she took a full-time job for and still works for IDG News Service, which I am now slightly affiliated with through my new hardware regular blog at PC World.)

The site as it appeared in April 2001

Since starting, I've covered extensively the growth of the hotspot market, the rise and fall and rise again of municipal networks, the change in consumer equipment from expensive and slow to cheap and fast, the growth of the enterprise market, the phoenix-like in-flight calling/broadband market, and, more recently, cellular and WiMax technology.

Enterprise coverage was once a central part of Wi-Fi Networking News, but it became clear a few years ago that as equipment was redesigned to be integral to the enterprise, that my ability cover and test gear was too limited, and the need for true enterprise experience was necessary to write about it. This disappointed a lot of enterprise readers and equipment makers who wanted me to keep writing about corporate hardware.

The focus over the last few years on municipal Wi-Fi was not just necessary--few people besides me were covering it in depth--but also represented the only significant news in the Wi-Fi world outside of the development of 802.11n/Draft N gear. It's only recently that WiMax, cellular data, spectrum auctions, and in-flight broadband have picked back up to become stories that you all want to know about--because they've become real technology you might work with. As the city-wide Wi-Fi arc played itself out, I'm covering it less because there's less of interest; it's going to become routine and the province of city CTOs and CIOs.

While writing this site, I try to have opinions, but not an agenda. I try to keep an open mind, though I do descend into cynicism, often well founded, but perhaps too readily employed. I'll try my best to keep myself honest and cheery in the years to come.

The biggest trends I expect to see develop in 2008 to 2010 are in these key areas:

Appliances. I expected 2007 to be the year that Wi-Fi was in everything: cameras, games, phones, and tchotchkes. Instead, Wi-Fi has only gradually spread, with a few gaming consoles, and many handsets and smartphones gaining or extending their use. It may be that I missed a trend: cameras in phones may become so good by 2009, that we don't need a camera with Wi-Fi at all (Wired reports today on several 5 megapixel cameraphones shown at CTIA this week). It's also likely that if WiMax gets a foothold, we'll get handhelds probably in 2009 that sport high-speed connections for all kinds of high-bandwidth purposes, like live uploading of streaming video.

Video over wireless. I look at this category as not just another instance of broadcast, like Qualcomm's MediaFLO which is really TV to the cell phone; rather, we'll see ways in which Wi-Fi, WiMax, and cellular data are used to push stored and streaming media to all sorts of devices. I look to Starbucks, Apple, and AT&T to lead the way on cached media in stores that can be filled up at local network speeds: download a full-length, HD movie in a few minutes in a Starbucks from the iTunes cache rather than 3 hours at home.

Radio over Wi-Fi. Internet radio via Wi-Fi music players seems like a trend--buying a boombox you can tune in wherever you are, or using a handheld MP3 players--but even with many devices, I don't feel a sense that it's caught on quite yet. If Apple puts Internet radio over Wi-Fi into new iPhone/iPod touch firmware, it'll likely take off; Nokia allows a third-party program for its N series for Internet radio over Wi-Fi already.

Cellular data/mobile broadband. I admit to being wrong about the potential of cell data, due to the overhype from the carriers and the horrible pricing relative to throughput and availability of the 1xRTT and GPRS systems. As cell data networks have matured into true broadband--slow, but broadband--media, the hype has lessened, disclosure has improved (no more "unlimited" usage, eh?), and the value has increased. We'll see more of the same with faster flavors of GSM networking and WiMax's deployment. The networks will become faster and cheaper and less restrictive.

For a good sense of what people are still reading on Wi-Fi Networking News, here are the titles of the top 10 articles since I switched to Google Analytics in Sept. 2006:

• Change Your Linksys WRT54G Admin Password Right Now!
• WPA Cracking Proof of Concept Available
• Weakness in Passphrase Choice in WPA Interface
• Most Wireless Speakers Don't Live Up to Goal
• Best Wi-Fi Signal Finder Yet
• Linksys Latest Models: Your Experience?
• T-Mobile Loses Starbucks; AT&T Becomes Wi-Fi Hotspot Giant
• Editorial: Don't Buy Draft N
• WPA for Free under Windows 2000
• The L in Linksys WRT54GL Stands for Linux

A few observations. Security remains key in people's minds: Security articles from 2004 are still being heavily viewed in 2008. Linksys is definitely high in people's minds for particular problems: Change the default password, buy a Linux (not VxWorks) embedded router, report problems with various models. Oddly, the wireless speakers and wireless printers articles are short stubs that are pure blog: they link to longer articles elsewhere. The Best Wi-Fi Signal Finder Yet story is 4 years old and still gets 1,000 page views a month. The invisible hand--nay, the long tail!--works in archives as it does everywhere.

Will I still be pounding away 7 years from now on this site? That seems about as unlikely as the last 7 years, which means it will probably happen. Traffic has dropped off over the years from the time in which Wi-Fi was a great (and expensive) mystery to today when there's more information and less confusion about it. As long as there are any questions to be answered, I'll keep writing.