Slashdot Mirror
Safe Options for Surfing While on the Road?
Sooner Boomer asks: "My oldest brother is an over-the-road truck driver. He subscribes to several wireless services at truck stops (Flying J, Pilot, etc.). I've tried to help him and educate him as much as possible, but he still has two problems; connectivity (poor signal strength) and security. His truck has a fiberglass shell, so that is not the problem. He has to run IE because this is the only browser supported for the log-in process. We've talked about wireless routers with reflectors on the antennas to boost signal strength, and to help with security. I'm still looking for better security though. Are there "live" linux browsers that can be run once a connection is made in windows? It's really gotten annoying because he has to reformat/reinstall about every two-three months. Ideas? Good trucker jokes?"
I've used my iBook at Flying Js all over the midwest. Safari worked fine to log on. Is he sure about needing IE to log on?
The Tao that can be spoken is not the one eternal Tao
A recent article on Slashdot talks about Anonym.OS, which is supposed to keep your web activities anonymous. Maybe he should look into it.
Since I don't have any ideas for you, here's my trucker joke:
A truck driver stopped at a roadside diner for lunch and ordered a cheeseburger, coffee, & a slice of apple pie. Three bikers came in, and one grabbed the trucker's cheeseburger out of his hand and took a huge bite from it. The second biker drank the trucker's coffee, & the third biker wolfed down the apple pie. The truck driver didn't say a word, just paid the cashier & left.
When he was gone, the bikers snickered & congratulated each other for being such bad asses. As the cashier walked up, a biker growled, "He ain't much of a man is he?"
"He's not much of a driver neither," replied the cashier. "He just backed his 18 wheeler over three motorcycles."
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I use IE in debian using crossover office from Codeweavers. I have to travel now and again for work and some hotels use the same setup where it requires that you use IE to make your connection (and yes, safari works too, but I don't have a mac)
All I have to do is make a connection to google with IE, then I use FF for everything else.
Evil Walrus >83=
User agent switcher is an extension for FireFox that will allow you to fake the "user-agent" string identifying your browser.
I'd tell you my trucker joke, but it's only semi-funny.
Well, this should be little different from securing any other Windows machine connected directly to a public network..
Indeed a router might help here, provided it also has some decent firewall functionality. I would myself go for a WRT54GL with OpenWRT, setup as a wireless client and with its wireless connection firewalled and doing address translation.
It would be very nice if you could get around the authentication problem by directly posting the authentication info with some script, woudl also remove the need for IE, but will probably take a bit of scripting in perl or the like, might even be able to solve this one with just some bash script and tools like wget. You'll have to figure out what the authentication page expects from the client. Makes you wonder of course why they aren't supporting WPA and 'enterprise authentication' so that clients get authenticated at the wireless network level and get to use proper encryption. Sould not be difficult to support considerig that many ISPs use some radius server for authentication already anyway and that is all they really need.
When using a router/firewall, the connection will stay up regardless of you rebooting the laptop, so you should be able to switch OS or whatever else you want to do.
But in the end, reinstalling Windows every few months should not be needed provided the WIndows machine has some important tools installed, such as a decent personal firewall, anti-virus tools and some adware/spyware blocker/remover.
Also, you can authenticate using IE, and then use Firefox for browsing I'd say, so unless there are other compelling reasons, I see no reason why running another browser would mean running another OS.
Of course, you could also use something liek vmware or such and run a live linux distro on top of Windows. Refer to the many 'which live CD to use' discussions of the last years for info on that, or just try a few.
Odd - unless they've changed it in the last year, I'd been using Konqueror to get onto it just fine...
It's possible many of them just SAY the site "only works with IE" because that's all they test on, but if you ignore the message in some cases you may be able to get in anyway...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
What about other options, such as cellular internet? Its cheaper nowadays, and is as simple as plugging in a pcmcia card. With this you can use it nearly anywhere, any time, at broadband speed... and youre not sharing the pipe with the other truckers. We all know what its like at a LAN party when one guy sucks all the available internet bandwidth for porn.... well if we had our own connection we wouldnt have to fear :)