The Green Bag

I'm at a work-related conference this weekend - and more about that in another entry, I think. One of the perks of this trip is that I have a snazzy new laptop for a few days. I was hoping to be able to bring an old spare one, or something. When I asked if one was available, I got a brand new one still in the box. I'll have to turn it in at the end of next week, but in the meantime, I'm having some fun with it.

The first thing that I noticed was the fingerprint pad. How cool is that? Granted, sometimes it takes enough tries to get a clean scan that I could probably type the password faster, but hey, it's new, it's cool, it's bionic - er, biometrics.

The more interesting feature is the wireless card. I've avoided wireless because it's insecure, and there are risks, and all of the other excuses. My wife reminds me that I was a very slow adopter of Microsoft Windows, as well.

I spent a good portion of my first day with the new laptop just pimping it out to make it secure enough for my liking. I installed PuTTY and even enabled Pageant for authentication using the fingerprint swipe, then set up secure tunnels for my email, web and remote control sessions so that all of my wi-fi traffic is encrypted at the application level.

Then I took the laptop home for the evening. I figured I would hook it up to the spare network cable that I ran when I wired the house, but first, let's see what wireless connections are available. The houses in our neighborhood are pretty far apart, so I didn't expect to see anything, but I found three wireless routers. One was properly secured, but the other two were wide open, and I've since connected through each of them at least once for a brief period, just to see it happen.

I had some free time on my first evening at the hotel, so I paid a visit to my cousin's house. I found the same thing there, one router was properly secured, and two were not, but I could not really connect to those with much success. Fortunately, the one router that was set up correctly belonged to my cousin, so we found the WEP key and I was able to connect correctly, and somewhat securely. I explained that WEP is pretty easy to crack, but it's pretty obvious that with two open routers and one secured router, it's quicker for the random wardriver to hijack the open ones. Only someone with specific malicious intent would take the time to go after the secured connection.

So then it was back to the hotel lounge to take advantage of the conference wireless. (It's not really supposed to be accessable from guest rooms, but the signal is strong enough that I'm actually on from my room right now.) Let's pop up My Network Places and take a look. Oh, two Windows laptops with wide open "Shared Documents" folders. I'll admit, I let curiosity get the better of me, and took a quick peek. One had a whole load of documents related to the conference I'm attending. I did not open any documents or look further; I closed up and went away. There's a fine line between curiosity and tresspass, and I'd prefer to not dip under it.

It seems that much of what I've read about wireless is true. Many people are completely wide open out there. My cousin is fortunate that the cable guy did the install properly, although WPA would have been better than WEP.

And of course, I said all that to say this: for one week, anyway, I have a bionic finger. nanananana...