I used to work for the IT dept of a large company, where our standard-issue workstation was a docking notebook. Policy was that they had to be locked when docked.
Security staff routinely prowled and confiscated any unsecured units. If yours was taken, you had to bring your manager in person to retrieve it.
The practice worked.
Let's get the facts right ...
on
802.11 RF Amp
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· Score: 1
True to form, Slashdotters have built a huge thread without anyone getting the facts right about this so-called "amp."
Note that Linksys is careful not to even call this product an amplifier. It's a "signal booster."
The WSB24 does not amplify the transmit signal much, if at all. The FCC test reports show its peak output at between 17.9 and 20.5 dBm, not much more that the access points and routers it sits on. 20 dBm = 100 mW, or 10 percent of the FCC max at the antenna connector.
Linksys never claimed the transmitted signal would be amplified. Its own published specs state only a nominal 14 dBm output level. (This could be conservative advertising; more likely it's because Linksys' marketing department doesn't know a dBm from a dB.)
Rather, the benefits of the unit are supposed to come by amplifying the received signals.
See this thread in the DSLR Linksys forum, which includes links to the FCC test data.
which is in wetware (the gray goo between the users' ears.)
The biggest problem with the hard-stop tools this academic is detracting is that people don't use them. It's 80 percent "social engineering."
The same problem obtains with this theoretical solution: The same user who won't bother to install a firewall (thus providing a hard-stop to the trojan/worm/virus) won't bother to install his tool either.
I'd rather sit behind my router and firewall. And when I find any malware, I will kill it.
Remember, Washington State is out front with these relatively strict rules. That's why there is a lawsuit there, and why we are reading about it.
But presumably, those of us in the other 49 states have no such protection in the first place. So our cell providers are probably already doing this.
Sounds like federal legislation is needed.
MS is not advising users "to completely eliminate downloadable ActiveX controls." Rather, it is advising users to disable the trusted-publisher status, which simply suppresses the warning prompt before downloading an ActiveX control.
Microsoft's problem, as they explain in the bulletin, is that the same certificate covers not only this control but several others as well. So revoking the certificate apparently would break a whole bunch of stuff.
What steps could I follow to prevent the control from being silently re-introduced onto my system?
The simplest way is to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft. If you do that, any attempt by either a web page or an HTML mail to download an ActiveX control will generate a warning message. Here's how to empty the Trusted Publishers list:
In Internet Explorer, choose Tools, then Internet Options.
Select the Content tab. In the Certificates section of the page, click on Publishers.
In the Certificates dialog, click on the Trusted Publishers tab.
For each certificate in the list, click on the certificate and then select Remove. Confirm that you want to remove the entry.
When you've removed all entries from the list, select Close to close the Certificates dialog, then click on OK to close the Internet Options dialog.
Your tax dollars have already funded a huge archive of spam at the Federal Trade Commission. In fact, they are running out of room to store the stuff.
The FTC says they can't release the contents because of privacy concerns, but surely there is a way around this: xxx out receivers' email addresses; apply secure aliases to protect the innnocent, etc.
Krelnik is right, of course. And this is no joke. It's a huge (anti-)civil liberties story.
At the 11th hour the proposal got tacked on to the Homeland Security bill about to clear Congress, despite vocal protests from parties ranging from the EFF to William Safire.
It's too late to stop this from becoming law now. To borrow a phrase from LBJ, this bill is going through Congress like a dose of salts through a widow-woman.
Slashdot Mirror
And just think how rejected all those horny coeds would feel!
Uh, not. In Texas there are 254 counties, including one with a population of 3,400,578 and another with a population of 67.
Soon AOL will start mailing out "free" PCs instead of those obnoxious CDs.
Any guesses on what the answer will turn out to be?
Reported several days ago here
I use Password Safe and like it. I keep my encrypted PW file and the app on one of those USB flash-memory devices.
Since Password Safe allows long passphrases, I use the DiceWare method to choose the master passphrase.
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
BTW, the Source Forge developer says he hopes to port to Linux.
I used to work for the IT dept of a large company, where our standard-issue workstation was a docking notebook. Policy was that they had to be locked when docked. Security staff routinely prowled and confiscated any unsecured units. If yours was taken, you had to bring your manager in person to retrieve it. The practice worked.
. . . Not me.
Note that Linksys is careful not to even call this product an amplifier. It's a "signal booster."
The WSB24 does not amplify the transmit signal much, if at all. The FCC test reports show its peak output at between 17.9 and 20.5 dBm, not much more that the access points and routers it sits on. 20 dBm = 100 mW, or 10 percent of the FCC max at the antenna connector.
Linksys never claimed the transmitted signal would be amplified. Its own published specs state only a nominal 14 dBm output level. (This could be conservative advertising; more likely it's because Linksys' marketing department doesn't know a dBm from a dB.)
Rather, the benefits of the unit are supposed to come by amplifying the received signals.
See this thread in the DSLR Linksys forum, which includes links to the FCC test data.
They are mostly on-topic.
There is a relatively low occurrence of lame wisecracks
Most of the posters seem to have read the content of the article before posting. If this keeps up, it threatens the very existence of the /. culture!
to those cool spiders in British Columbia.
The biggest problem with the hard-stop tools this academic is detracting is that people don't use them. It's 80 percent "social engineering."
The same problem obtains with this theoretical solution: The same user who won't bother to install a firewall (thus providing a hard-stop to the trojan/worm/virus) won't bother to install his tool either.
I'd rather sit behind my router and firewall. And when I find any malware, I will kill it.
Remember, Washington State is out front with these relatively strict rules. That's why there is a lawsuit there, and why we are reading about it. But presumably, those of us in the other 49 states have no such protection in the first place. So our cell providers are probably already doing this. Sounds like federal legislation is needed.
MS is not advising users "to completely eliminate downloadable ActiveX controls." Rather, it is advising users to disable the trusted-publisher status, which simply suppresses the warning prompt before downloading an ActiveX control.
Microsoft's problem, as they explain in the bulletin, is that the same certificate covers not only this control but several others as well. So revoking the certificate apparently would break a whole bunch of stuff.
Your tax dollars have already funded a huge archive of spam at the Federal Trade Commission. In fact, they are running out of room to store the stuff. The FTC says they can't release the contents because of privacy concerns, but surely there is a way around this: xxx out receivers' email addresses; apply secure aliases to protect the innnocent, etc.
Krelnik is right, of course. And this is no joke. It's a huge (anti-)civil liberties story.
At the 11th hour the proposal got tacked on to the Homeland Security bill about to clear Congress, despite vocal protests from parties ranging from the EFF to William Safire.
It's too late to stop this from becoming law now. To borrow a phrase from LBJ, this bill is going through Congress like a dose of salts through a widow-woman.