And then look what shows up in the command line interface: Arrgh!

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.

Well, they are just one of many people that have been targeted by this company.  What they do is scan the registrar records of known domains and send letters to all the contacts that are listed with the domain.  These letters look a lot like bills, even though there is a small place where they state “This notice is not a bill”.  Take a look at what this guy, who registers a lot of domains in his online marketing company, went through with this company.  He also recorded his conversations!  Conveniently available for you to listen in MP3 format.  Also, check out the Google search for “Domain Registry of America scam”.

In my opinion, DRoA = dirty rats!  Also, please read everything on a “bill” before sending them money.  Especially if you have to create a new vendor for them in your payment system.

Actually, that’s not the topic of the post. I was curious about what happens to coffee grounds when you flush them down the toilet. I know you’re not supposed to put them down the drain or even in the disposal unit in your sink (I’m guilty) but at the office I’ve been flushing the grounds left over from my press. So with a little google-fu, I ended up finding this very misconceived article on “To Flush or Not To Flush“. It starts off very well with some valid points about poisoning aquatic life with chemicals down the toilet. It makes sense. However, their proposed solutions aren’t so great:

1. They mention that landfills are the best place to put chemicals and medical waste products because of the plastic liners in all modern landfills. This seemed dubious to me. First I doubt that all landfills actually have this geomembrane (that’s what they call the plastic liners). Secondly, while plastics can be pretty amazing materials, they aren’t immune or inert. This means that plastics will eventually break down, they can be pierced by heavy machinery, they can leak. A little more google-fu shows some details on this from a trash presentation at a university.
2. The one that really gets me is:
   

   Placing kitty litter in empty milk container and pour liquid cleaners, or liquid medicines into it that way it will be absorbed, with no worry of contaminating the environment.

   Sounds good from the outside, but think about this a little more. Kitty litter? Have you ever smelled well-used kitty litter? Smells like kitty pee, doesn’t it? Have you ever picked it up with your bare hands?  No, because its wet with kitty pee and who knows what else!?  This is a solution for no worry of contaminating the environment?

So what has me so riled up?  Its misconceptions like these that lead to lazy environmentalism. Lazy work can often get things really messed up, maybe not at first glance, but over time I’ve come to know that lazy work just fails. What’s the point of giving someone a false sense of saving the environment?  If it ends up in the landfill, and the landfill leaks into the water tables, then the aquatic environment is still threatened.  These are ultimately empty measures.

(note about coffee presses: I like the idea of using a press because I use less materials (no coffee filters) and don’t waste coffee (only 1 cup at a time) or water. It also makes a pretty nice cup of coffee. The water cooler also has hot water in it in the office, and I’d hate to see all that energy expended if noone used it.)

I have no problem with the hulu.com advertising between scenes, its very traditional. I don’t even mind the hulu logo in the bottom right corner of the screen, as I’ve gotten used to that from some television stations. However, I do not appreciate the new ads I see on the bottom of the screen during the show. Bah! I don’t really want to know about Chili’s Bottomless Express Lunch. All those restaurants are serving us portions that are too large as it is..  now its bottomless?

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, I call VZW tech support and they have me go through the hoops. It was a bit tricky since I called them on my
cell phone – I ended up having to borrow someone else’s so I could talk while troubleshooting the connection. We even tried making a manual connection to the VZW BroadbandAccess network. No go! so the very kind tech lets me know that I’ll receive a text message with the issue number in it and it will be looked at by the techs when it comes up in their queue.

About 30 minutes later I get a phone call from the same tech that helped me out indicating that someone else told her I needed to check the Microsoft site for “Error 720″ and will have to uninstall/reinstall the TCP/IP protocol. Well, I’m not daunted by this, but frankly I thought their brains were full of marshmallow. So I try to use the phone on my desktop first, just to see if I really needed to look at Dial-Up issues on my laptop. I’m all fired up now… tell ME to reinstall TCP/IP on my laptop will you? I will show you! As if I don’t know what I’m doing!? How dare you! I install everything on the desktop, click connect and… well it worked! What the hell? They were right? Actually, yeah… they were because I took the stock installatoin of Windows XP straight from the IBM image that came with Service Pack 1. I didn’t install it myself from scratch. *sigh*

I look on Microsoft’s site for the Error 720, but the only one I can find is one for Windows 2000 Professional. This particular KB article says to remove TCP/IP as part of the troubleshooting process. Well, you can’t do that in XP. I dig a little deeper and find a resolution on Lenovo’s (Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought the ThinkPad line from IBM) Support Forums. Here’s what I had to go through that worked for me.

So, thank you, VZ Tech! I really appreciate you calling me back on that because I was about to turn off the feature and rant on Verizon Wireless!