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is one based on peer-maintained and user-maintained trust. I have written the outlines for such an approach.

That's exactly what I propose here.

I've been thinking about this problem, and its various dead-end solutions (micropayments, rewriting SMTP, strong client/server auth, third-party circles of trust), and have come to the conclusion that none are necessary, or particularly desireable.

I've put together the beginnings of an alternate proposal, which draws on some of the good aspects of the above approaches, without the need to rewrite SMTP. It's a community-based, peer-based approach that leaves the power in the hands of the operator. Plus, there's no profit motive (except that it's in an operator's best interest, and thus the corporate owner's best interest, to maintain his/her server's level of trust).

That's very cool. Rendezvous is really coming into its own. I wrote up instructions on how to Rendezvous-enable pretty much anything you'd like, using any Unix box and a bit of C code and shell scripting.

What has stopped me from buying, however, is the claim that this card does not work under current Linux drivers because it uses a currently undocumented MAC chip, although the rest of the hardware is supposed to be standard Intersil Prism.

Does anyone know if this problem is still the case? If the hardware were documented I would probably feel comfortable enough buying the chip and adapting one of the Prism drivers to it. (One the other hand, I would use a different card or do without rather than run a proprietary driver.)

By the way, the SMC card the MicroCenter had for $140 looks identical to the Socket card from the outside. I would be intersted in knowing if they are the same, and if anyone has used the SMC card under Linux.

I hear B.I.O. Bugs are quite hackable, and are based on work by roboticist Mark Tilden.

The SliMP3 is quite hackable, as the code's all in Perl (see the developer's list).

LEGO MindStorms are a perennial favorite, and are extremely hackable.

And let's not forget TiVo, which is a hacker's playground.

Finally, one of the new Compaq iPaqs can be hours of fun once you install Linux on it and begin having wireless fun with it.

Too bad this is old news fellas. A group from UC-Berkeley has done an even more in-depth research project about the (in)security of wep, and can be viewed here:

Wep (in)Security

One of the important things to point out is that in the paper done by this group of people is that the also included active attacks, which is a pretty neat tool. I won't elaborate too much on this, but it is possible for a hacker (bad context) to act like a man-in-the-middle attack, sniffing your packets off the air, then doing whatever to them, then sending them to you (as if nothing every happened).

The sad thing is that most people don't even know that encryption is available on some of these models.

One other important thing to point out with wireless LANs is the new thing with war driving (similar to war dialing). What this consists mainly of is someone sitting outside in your parking lot and just surfing the net for free. There are also more complex stuff that is done out there, specifically in San Franscisco where the whole city was marked out by the http://www.dis.org guys, containing all the wireless LANs available as well as their SSID's (think of identification).

Here are some links on wardriving:
Mobile Wardriving
San Fran War Driving
General War Driving Info

One last thing to point out is that new technology that is coming out allows you to make a mobile sniffer device just using a Compaq iPaq, a Lucent wireless LAN PC Card, and a few other items (depending how sophisticated you want to get), and all of this can be done for under 1000 US dollars.

God bless Al Gore for creating the Internet.

S'not a rumor. Have a look at my site, which contains APStatus, a Perl script I wrote that will report interface stats on a remote AirPort Base Station via SNMP.

I'm currently working on back-engineering the method used to provision the things so they can be installed without using a Mac.

S'not a rumor. Have a look at my site, which contains APStatus, a Perl script I wrote that will report interface stats on a remote AirPort Base Station via SNMP.

I'm currently working on back-engineering the method used to provision the things so they can be installed without using a Mac.