Tuesday, June 27, 2006

A Quick Trivia Question

A super-paranoid company offers a wireless network to its employees within its building. Of course, they implement all the latest security measures: WPA, VPN, MAC filtering, and disabling SSID broadcast. They also have all computers patched with the latest versions of all software.

Assuming that you can get into the building, what would be the easiest way to disable their wireless network?

Friday, June 23, 2006

Justice in the IT World

Wow. This will be my first post in quite some time. I hope it's good.

So today I was browsing a forum I frequent, and I ran across a thread discussing this. I warn you, it's a long read, but certainly worth your time if you like stories about getting people to do the right thing.

For those too lazy to read it, here's a brief synopsis: This guy (Evan)'s girlfriend lost her T-Mobil Sidekick, which two people picked up and decided was theirs. the couple take pictures of themselves which are instantly uploaded to T-Mobil's database and suddenly Evan finds out who has the sidekick. the site is very like a blog in that he uses it to follow his plight to get the Sidekick back. Two weeks later, after grappling with the NYPD who won't even help the guy until they feel some massive media pressure, the girlfriend finally gets the sidekick back.

Anyway, the whole story stuck me as I have a very strong sense of justice. It's amazing to me how much resistance this guy faced, both from the thieves and from THE FREAKING POLICE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO BRING CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE, just to get a stolen sidekick back. Even better, he turned down numerous offers to have ads on his site, which would have made him thousands of dollars. The only way he made money was through a donation through paypal, which was only to cover costs.

We need more people like Evan.

Peace.