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Wireless Year in Review
Irish writes "The wireless world had some surprises last year. WLANs, with easy but unsecure bandwidth, may disrupt the adoption of regulated/limited 3G networks. DoCoMo's iMode surprised many gaining 27 million users while Europe was disappointing. This developerWorks article takes a look at the big wireless security stories of 2001 and tries to offer some predictions on the future."
I think that the best way to use a wireless network is to merely use the WEP as a method to initially authenticate that users are allowed to connect to the wireless network.
Once people are on the wireless network, they come up against a firewall. They must use a VPN client to connect their computers to the network on the other side of the firewall. Any communications between clients also goes through the firewall.
Then and only then are you even close to safe. And some brainiac is probably already figuring out a way through both layers of encryption.
-- Never make a general statement.
And this is related to wireless networking how? Maybe you think that prayer is related to wireless networking somehow?
-- Never make a general statement.
Yeah, well, maybe offtopic but a damn nice deal!
Great! What internet server can I download the car from? Or will you just send me the $0.05 CDROM in the mail?
Oh, btw, the topic is wireless networking... nice troll though.
The source of all this are the talking heads over at cnet radio. since they do a lot of repeats over the weekend you might be able to catch more details there. (anchor desk radio show, etc. especially the friday broadcast)
ah, here's the link to the story, reasonably detailed.
[cnet radio recently started broadcasting full time in Boston at 890 am, along with their usual broadcasts in the bay area. it is kinda funny listening to san jose traffic reports while cruising route 128]
[shrug]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
for me security in wireless stuff if far more biological than hacker and privacy.
Those frequency are crazy and the power of the signal is far too strong.
A car is not that expensive to manufacture, a $25 000 car costs about $2 000 to make.
Still car-makers does not have a profit-margin of 99% or anything like that and this is because most of the costs are spended before a single car is sold, just like software.
Just like all products these days (including software) most value is in different types of intellectual property. To make a product you have lots of engineering, safety tests (when it comes to cars for example), design, marketing etc etc.
This is what lots of people in the dot-com and open source businesses hasn't got, people like low costs BUT they want something for their money.
When you did buy a car the last time, did you buy a trabant or lada. No, you probably didn't, why didn't you? They are really cheap! Something like $3 000 for a medium budget model.
What product a consumer whants to buy is a combination of many factors. Like quality, level of professional support, long time dedication from the seller etc etc. To make good products you need an income, otherwise you can only fill the low-cost requirement, not the others (often more important).
A top of the line intel processor costs about $15-$20 to make. Any product, let it be cars, furniture, radios, or whatever the productioncost is just a fraction of the sale cost.
Hehe, yeah, moderators don't have any humor. :)
I read the article and it missed several fundamental points.
1) SMS do not cost on average 30 cents USD. More like 10 cents EURO. This is by looking at the big carriers in Europe. But SMS is catching on because people thinking it is trendy and cool and IT KILLS TIME.
2) Imode is popular in Japan because of the problems with Internet in general. In Japan land lines are expensive and take a long time to get installed. Hence landline Internet access is not a viable solution. However IMode was priced right and the Japanese mentality "small is beautiful" works. Try that in Europe and North America and it will flop on its face. Europe and North America has cheap Internet and hence wants the full experience.
3) They are all missing the real reason why some wireless works and not others. It is COST and only COST. SMS is cheap in contrast to other wireless. IMode is cheap in contrast to others. WLan is cheap in contrast to 3-G or GPRS.
Hence all of the solutions have nothing to do with security, or coolness of the factors, but COST. If two wireless technologies beside each other were cheap then there is a different story to tell. But in wireless it is basically either cheap or expensive and the people go to droves to the cheap one.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
On the Hardy toll road in Houston, I was able to connect to eight wireless APs at 70 MPH (so read the log when I reached my destination). Three even went so far as to assign IP addresses via DHCP.
:p
I would suppose that says something about wireless security.
Do you like German cars?
What still concerns me is that "Wireless == Cellphones" geez, this entire article was more about selling cellphones than wireless lans.
In reading this article, what I noticed first off was the complete non-mention of the 802.11g first draft. Basically 802.11g is the application of all the technology advances of a over b, but in 2.4gig and not 5gig. G was referred for a first draft by the IEEE at their Austin meeting. What spurned this on was the Chipset manufacturers were scared that Intel would push A and they would be out major R&D dollars on G.
And A is going to be a real real tough sell now, that G is on the horizon and will most likely be a firmware upgrade to the existing 2.4GHz radios, instead of a full truck roll out replacement.
Kim also fails to mention (could this be because they don't want to push a competing technology???) the development of WEP2 using AES. Most vendors are chomping on the bit to get a finalized standard for WEP using AES. In the meantime they're stuck using some sort of key rotation technology, which basically generates random WEP keys and changes the WEP key automatically every seconds. This technology was specifically designed into 802.1x, which is probably the best thing out there for Wireless lan security.
Until AES based WEP is deployed, 802.1x is the savior of wireless security. She doesn't mention the specs of it, but with 802.1x you get the WEP key rotation, MAC level authentication, smart card / certificate based authentication (or MD5 challenge username/passwords), all thru RADIUS. 802.1x pushes authentication before association, so one can't even associate with the AP unless they've authenticated first. Pretty nice.
Grrr... second try on this post... my comp decided to go offline the instant I pressed preview.... grrrrrrrr..... fscking winblows
Anywho... AT&T is currently in the process of a MAJOR 3G buildout/expansion. I am not sure what technology they are using for the 3G expansion, maybe someone else has more information on that. If memory serves me right they use IS-195 with is TDMA based on the voice side. It will also be interesting to see how they integrate that with the analog voice channels they have in the A and B cell bands.
Also I think Verizon is about to pop. They have been building a few new switches and I've heard rumors of a major buildout from the Midwest all the way to the West coast. It would not supprise me if they were also going to do an upgrade to 3G while they are at it, or that they might put 3G into their PCS bands they got through the merger. I would love to hear more.
I've also heard that Nextel and Cingular are about to also buildout. I've heard that Nextel is going to implement Wide CDMA with like 15khz of bandwidth... if this is true then it sounds kinda broken...
Wireless... home of some truely interesting shtuff
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
Judging by the number of comments on this story, I'd say it wasn't much of a year.
Check the developer manuals. Note, Handspring doesn't have very many devices with anything more than 3.1, and Sony has mostly 4.0 based devices, whereas Palm lingers between the two. Which one do you suppose will be mostly supporting bluetooth and WLAN cards?
8-?
In USA there are two paths to 3G type services GSM1900 - GPRS - EDGE -(WCDMA?) and cdmaOne - cdma2000_1X - cdma2000_3X
See the possible data speeds
Cingular for example has gone the EDGE route