Reporting this as it happens – a large explosion has occured in the car park of Madrid’s Barajas T4 terminal. It appears that the Basque terrorist group ETA called in advance warning about the attack. This could be a fatal blow to the peace process that started a few months ago. The explosion took place around 9:00 CET, and three people were injuried.
This is rather funny, be it not because it involves a US congressman, Denny Rehberg of Montana, and his communications director. Apparently, Rehberg was not happy with the grades he got while at Texas Christian University, and thus started to shop around for a hacker that would break into the institution’s systems to upgrade his grades. He contacted none other than attrition.org, where the entire email exchange has been posted. It is a rather fun read if you are a true hacker – not to be confused with a criminal, who are into doing these sort of things – and a warning to clueless politicians.
Not much point to .mobi domains in the realms of Verizon, it seems – the New York Times reports that starting 2007, ads will be placed on sites that are accessed using their mobile phones. The Verizon Wireless release claims that certain types of ads and video clips will not be allowed, as they may not be compatible with the limited browsers found in the phones, but this is not very encouraging – meaning that they will allow video clips. Will this not hugely increase the amount of data used during browsing? I believe Verizon offers all-you-can-eat data plans, but if you are not using one of those, you could feel the pain. In any case, having to wade through a mobile website rendered on a tiny screen is hard enough as it is, with some devices not being able to cope with the amount of processing required, resulting in a very slow and frustrating experience. Add videos, which require much higher resources to be played back, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Leaving aside regulatory issues that may turn this particular setup into an illegal operation, I will better not describe the quality of the installation to be polite. Check out this picture:
Spotted the problem yet? Radio antennas are affected by any element that is present around them, even non-metallic elements, such as the ground. In this particular case, kanijo, a Fonero, has attempted to provide more “range” to his FON hotspot, which is in itself commendable, however, the means may not result in the desired end – original FON forum thread here.
You can see that the vertical omni antenna, a carefully tuned radiating element, has been strapped to a metallic pole, which also runs a coaxial cable into a TV antenna right on top. The router is inside a sealed plastic box, with power and Ethernet going into it from below. There is no way that this antenna is radiating correctly, as the pole that supports it is probably grounded (if it has been installed according to regulations), and even if it is not, it is inducing an imbalance into the tuned element, causing a large amount of RF to be attenuated. The user reports good results with it, which are most likely due to good luck.
The second problem with this type of setup is that vertical antennas don’t emit downwards, and thus will provide very limited coverage to users below the antenna. There is some downwards bleed of course, but it will only reach lower users that are some distance away from the antenna.
Recommendations for these sort of setups: install the antenna right at the top of its own pole, and ground the pole. If you have no choice but to use an existing pole, get a T arm fitting and mount the antenna at least 1 meter (3 feet) away from the pole. A perfect example of such as setup, in this case with two supports as the antenna is rather large and care for wind load is needed, is this (credit to Roger Halstead):
Check out Roger’s page, it is a very good read if you are interested in radio installations.
A few weeks ago, I learned about the passing of a good friend, Steve Uhrig. A few years ago, I was involved in projects relating to IT security, surveillance, tracking and communications, and in this line of work I met Steve. When I joined a TSCM mailing list, actually, the TSCM mailing list, one of the members that caught my attention was him – always outspoken, honest and technically sound. He would not take crap from anybody, and provided lengthy explanations or rebuttals in his posts. He was always there to lend a hand.
Steve ran SWS Security, and specialized in everything related to surveillance and communications, working with many government agencies over the years, and even becoming the technical advisor in the movie ‘Enemy of the State‘, where he also got a small part as the guy selling electronics in a shop. You can read more about him and his activities in his own website, still maintained by his friend M.L. Shannon. He was also involved in the amateur radio community, his callsign WA3SWS now silent, also actively participating in emergency communications support.
Whenever I got stuck in a particular subject, Steve would always gladly help, spending hours answering to emails about technical subjects in great depth, be it grounding systems for lightning protection to high-performance surveillance camera systems. I will miss him a lot, and only wish I could have had more time to get to know him better. This time of the year is when one tends to remember parted friends and family, so this is my little tribute to his memory.
Reading an article in The Register by Bill Ray, he thinks the Apple iPhone will fail, actually, fail badly. I somewhat doubt his conclusions.
The main argument to support his analysis is that since network operators have to like the phone, then Apple has to do a good job convincing them. Remember the ROKR? It was rather a failure due to the fact it could only be loaded with iTunes music over cable, and thus mobile operators were left out of attractive data chargers levied when buying music directly from the phone. There was even speculation that Apple allowed it to launch on purpose, to protect their audio player market.
Where Bill goes wrong in my opinion is that the handset market is heavily controlled in the US, but not in Europe – go to any shop in the latter and you will have a very large variety of handsets to buy unsubsidized. Why? Because a lot of people value the ability to switch operators as they see fit, without having to enter into contracts involving their soul. In the US, there isn’t a culture of operator hopping, but rather of staying with one just to get a phone $50 or $100 cheaper.
One thing I have never understood is why people get themselves tied into a two year contract for a $50 saving. If they worked out how much they could save by moving operators taking advantage of special offers, they may think twice.
There is a very large number of paths Apple could follow, first, they have a nice distribution network with excellent shops placed in key areas, second, they have a large and loyal crowd of followers, who would probably not mind paying an unsubsidized device, and third, there are already a number of MVNOs and fixed-line operators that are willing to take a bite from the large networks. As for the subsidy, I wonder…are iPods subsidized by anyone? Apple costumers are used to pay for quality, and in my view, the iPhone will be no different.
The name of the company has been blurred to protect the innocent, and my email too, to prevent OCR-capable spam bots – this is what landed in my inbox today:
Fancy that! A Christmas greeting with a legal disclaimer. So, let’s see what the implications are:
In any case, thanks for scanning the greeting with F-Secure to make sure there were no Christmas bugs attached.
The guys at Pobletewireless have been busy with the Fonera lately, and have now posted a step-by-step hack to add a DB9 connector that allows easy access to the built-in serial port, without having to make IDC cable headers and so on. [Link]
The hack gives access to the console, with which you can do all sorts of nice and interesting things.
Techworld.com reports that UK WiFi aggregator Divine Wireless will be offering a new service, which covers some 15.000 hotspots run by BT Openzone, amongst others, charged in minutes rather than hours or days. Thus, a user would pay 8 pence per minute, or 4.80 GBP per hour. This is still very expensive, but the fact that you only pay for the minutes you use will make it very attractive to occasional users, to quickly check email, for example. Will people go for it? Maybe, but only if you really can get connected while waiting for the bus to come, as they claim in their typical scenario.
The New York Times ran a story two days ago, also picked up by Glenn Fleishman over at WiFi Net News, about how hard it is sometimes to get connected at hotels over their WiFi networks. Some travelers even report a failure rate of 50%, in comparison with 5% in wired connections. Support is usually directed to a hotline run by the hotspot operator, which results in a rather frustrating experience.
I have also seen it all, hotels with only WiFi in the lobby and wired connections in the rooms (Hotel Fox, in Copenhagen), others with very spotty coverage that reached only certain rooms, getting connected to another hotel’s WiFi across the street, then realizing it was free and only asked for a room number and surname, while your own hotel charged you a fortune, and so on.
My best experience was during DEFCON 14 in Las Vegas, where we stayed in the MGM Grand hotel. These guys went over the top, and installed an AP in every single room!. It was bolted underneath the table, inside a metal case, and the deprecated Ethernet cable was connected to it. A quick scan revealed that I could only see about 4 or 5 networks from my room, and only two with a half-decent signal, which makes me believe they turned down the power of the APs so as to avoid interference problems.
Wouldn’t it be great if with falling hardware costs, other hotels would do the same thing? To avoid interference between rooms, apart from channel variations, one could either turn each room into miniature Faraday cages, or turn down the power of the AP to a minimum.
