IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

OK, so I use a nice VPN solution that works through every public WiFi I’ve ever encountered.  Great – no problem (which one you ask?  My Astaro Security Gateway…  but its implementing OpenVPN which is open source so anyone could set their own up withour the UTM).  So I’m not too concerned about running my Virtual Desktop (Windows XP Pro, virtualized onto VMware Server 2.0) because the connection from my laptop to the Virtual Desktop is encrypted.  So when using non-encrypted public WiFi, the traffic that others can see freely is encrypted.

Enter the All Ways On Wireless at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, DC.  Its a pay-for public WiFi, I’m not against paying for it.  Its actually running quite nicely and the regular, non-VPN enabled all-day pass works just fine with my VPN (another reason I like OpenVPN).  However, when I went to purchase my day of access, it led me to a non-encrypted web page to type in my credit card details.  Seeing as the radio frequency traffic between my laptop and the wireless access point is not encrypted and completely open to anyone that knows how to look, I essentially broadcast my credit card details out for that potential someone to steal.

Be wary of public wifi access spots that make you enter credit card details without leading you to a secure web page (that’s when you see https:// in the address bar, or that little padlock in the status bar of your browser).  I don’t think my details are now in the hands of some nefarious identity theif, but its a lot more possible now that I’ve given them out over unencrypted radio transfer.  Someone taking this information wouldn’t even be recorded as a data breach in the All Ways On Wireless financial system – since essentially they didn’t hack into their database they just listened to the freely broadcast, unencrypted traffic.

When will companies start taking security of information more seriously?  I tried to go to their website (www.allwayson.net) but strangely enough, you can’t even get to their website from their own public wifi gateway.  I wonder if its even up anymore, or if it changed and noone set up any forwarding address.

I’ve used a few mobile phone platforms over the years. My first was a hearty Motorola StarTac – remember those things? haha. Most recently I’ve used an HTC phone made for Verizon – the XV6800 with Windows Mobile 6. I was pretty excited, let myself buy into the hype. My Treo 650 (which for the most part I was enjoying) was broken with a shattered screen so I went out and bought the HTC. (more…)

So I bought this phone, I kinda like it. I decided what the hey, maybe I’ll check out using it as a USB modem. So far, not bad. Its got the nice wireless EVDO broadband and the modem link works pretty well. I can’t receive calls when I’m linked up, but I can deal with that. I’m using it now to post here. There seems to be an issue with using SSL VPN (via my Astaro Security Gateway), but maybe I have to use a different type of VPN to get that to work with this connection. It does connect, but (more…)

OK, so I thought all of my Wireless Hell days were over with the installation of my Intel Wireless Adapter. Then I decided to see what it would be like to use my Verizon HTC XV6800 as a USB modem for my laptop. I give VZW a call, they offer to let me use the feature for free for a month, charging at $15 per month after that. How generous of them :) So I download the latest drivers for the phone to work as a modem, download the latest VZAccess Manager software and was able to follow the instructions on their website just fine for my model phone. Everything appeared to be working properly. I even got a display from the VZAccess Manager screen that showed me how strong of a signal I could get from the phone. I was pretty happy… then I clicked Connect.

Yeah, and Connect and connect and connect again. ARR! I kept getting errors that the computer could not establish a connection. So yesterday while I had some downtime at my Red Cross Golf Fundraiser (more…)

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GParted did the job! I was able to resize my partition. At first I was a bit nervous booting into GParted (I used the automatic boot, worked fine) because I saw a lot of command-line text as it was booting. And then I saw a Linux bash prompt. I cringed, thinking “Oy, I’m going to have to learn some esoteric command line stuff in order to resize this partition…” and just a couple seconds after that I saw a GUI interface come up. Hmm, quite nice. I clicked on my drive, found my partition and was able to actually just use the mouse to resize my partition with a click on the edge of the partition and then dragged it larger. Very nice! I was able to use some finer controls below the graphic interface with some numbers in it (representing the size of the partition) to leave myself 8 GB of space at the end of the drive (that’s 8192 MB). I decided I would put the virtual memory here in a 4GB virtual memory file, leaving 4 GB of space left on that partition as well. Following the prompts on the screen I was able to do what I needed to resize the partition! I was very happy as I’ve been searching for a free partition manager for years. I’m glad the folks at Clonezilla led me to GParted. (more…)