Brew Nerds » technology

i got a new toy

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:32:42 +0000

Today I got a new toy wireless router. It seems my old Linksys WRT-54G with DD-WRT on it didn’t want to play nice with my MacBook Pro anymore. I favor Belkin, and I couldn’t resist the eye-candy nerd appeal of their new N1 Vision. Take a look:

It supports WPA2, 802.11N, and all the other fun new letter-number combinations.

Now to start working on hacking it so I can see the weather forecast on the display.

wardriving

Leonard — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:13:00 +0000

Recently I’ve taken to a new hobby: wardriving.

For the uninitiated, wardriving involves coupling your laptop with a
GPS device and driving around to catalog the various access points
that are viewable.

Some darker-than-white-hat hackers take wardriving to the next level
and piggyback onto open wireless networks that are available. My
interest lies solely in collecting information about the security of
the available networks. Of the 613 wireless networks I have found in
the past 3 days, 38% are using WEP encryption, 20% are using WPA/WPA2
encryption and 42% are using no encryption.

My setup of choice is the following:
-15″ Intel Core2 Duo MacBook Pro
-Kismac Trunk r273
-Hawking Technology USB Wireless G Adapter (HWUG1A)
-Hawking outdoor 9dBi gain omnidirectional antenna (HAO9SIP)

Kismac will export a Google Earth KML file that will allow you to view
your previous wardriving adventures. It is quite interesting how many
people don’t care about security these days.

Of course all of my blog readers have fully secured enterprise level
WPA2 talking to a RADIUS server with two-factor authentication.

Am I right or am I right?

iphone cool fact #1

Leonard — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:36:00 +0000

there’s a myriad of reasons why the iphone is an amazing feat of technology. some are plainly obvious, while others can only be realized by the approximately 5,000,000 extraordinarily intelligent iphone users in the galaxy.

the iphone does not have an actual keyboard, rather a virtual keyboard that is generated on the touch screen. as you are about to select a particular key, it becomes magnified. this serves to make it easier to select, since the iphone is a sleek and beautiful device, and our human fingers are clumsy and lacking in elegance.

here’s where it gets sweet. the iphone recognizes common words, so it uses the science of probability to predict the next character you will type. for characters that are statistically more likely to be next (such as “e” after “coff”), the iphone enlarges the landing area around the key, making it much easier to select the correct next letter and much more difficult to select a statistically impossible letter (“x” after “coff”, for example).

your iphone is smarter than you.