Wireless (in)security

For the past year a contact of mine has been carrying a wireless network sniffer around Gothenburg and outskirts. Hidden in plainview on his smartphone, steadily going wherever he went. Adding network after network. All while noting their coordinates, securitylayers and names. Now when the number of AP’s in his database has exceeded 11 000 he decided to share this data with me to try to make sense of the information and try to present the statistics in an orderly fashion.

Regarding security level it’s comforting to know that WPA is, by far, the dominating encryptionmethod.

11097 Access Points was detected. Of these there was 3468 using WPA2 Personal, 3561 using WPA Personal, 489 using WPA2 Enterprise, 119 using WPA Enterprise, 1706 using WEP and 1751 using no security at all.

Using no security can sometimes be justified. It might be a guestnetwork or it might be network with some form of authentication mechanism like a Radius-server or something like that. Therefore we’re not gonna read to much into the fair number of open networks in our fair city.

WEP-security however, it rarely justified. One reason might be that your Wii gamingconsole doesn’t support any higher encryption than WEP. That was actually true when I bought my console several years ago but I find it hard to belive they haven’t fixed that yet.

Another common reason noted is that the ISP is delivering their equipment with WEP-encryption predefined! This although their equipment still supports WPA2. With some ISP you can’t even manage your own network equipment. You have to call them over the phone (in this decade?) and ask them nicely to raise your wireless security to something that can’t be cracked in 4 minutes.

Very pretty boot analysis tool

While I’ve previously used BootRacer to get a general idea of my computers boottime I’ve now come across a much better tool. Sure Sysinternals autoruns is the perfect tool for monitoring your boot processes it just doesn’t give all the information. Enter Soluto Boot Analysis. This great tool gives you an overview of exactly how long each application takes to start and gives you the option to delay it or pause. If you want to remove it completly it’ll have to be done the old fashioned way. It also gives you overall information of the application, how many Soluto users worldwide is using this app, and whether not they’ve opted to pause it or not. It’s also carrying a pretty interface that’s kind of cool. Try it out!

References:

http://www.soluto.com/

Easy way to go from dvd to usb

Reinstallation of systems is something I do on a pretty frequent basis. Problem is that I pretty much left disk-readers behind me. to much work overall, an unnecessary expense and not mention: very oldschool.

The other day I came upon a very handy tool from Microsoft that I just can’t understand why they doesn’t promote any better. The tool of the hour is Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.

Contrary to the name, you really need to download your own ISO files to use this handy software. The point is that the software prepares an USB-stick to be bootable from and moves files, creates bootpartitions and whatnot. Something, I for one, thought was a very distracting process. Not mention that I usually bounce from XP to 7 and this usually messes with my bootpartitions immensly.

This tool saves me time. thats enough for me.

Download it and try it out!

Referenser:

http://download.cnet.com/Windows-7-USB-DVD-Download-Tool/3000-18513_4-10972600.html

Utbytt disk till SSD

Innan: Seagate Barracuda SATA2 disk
Efter: Intel SSD something something

Vid sidan är min nuvarande Windows boottid.

Tog nu ingen innan, men belive you me, det tog över en minut så skillnad är det iallafall!

Downloading made easy

It was a while since I had a sweet setup like this. This time im gonna document it for future reference.
The topic at hand is the big hassle of downloading torrent files. You gotta search for the file on the web, open it with a torrentprogram and so on. Well the thing is i'd rather have my server handle all the downloading so my laptops won't get so excited all the time. Not to mention the problem of sharing these files between different viewing sites. Well uTorrent has this, have had for a long while, webgui interface. Just enable the Web UI setting under preferences and your on your way.
Default setting is port 8080, which must be activated and allowed in the local firewall. uTorrent doesn't handle that part of the forwarding by itself.
So now we have a nice little webpage we can log into and add our files and let the server manage the downloading. We just share the download folder on our private GB-network and access it all from anywhere in the network.

But it's still a hassle, and the webpage is slow you say... I know what you mean. Therefore, enter the Firefox addin "bittorrent webui". Don't let the name fool you. It actually does support uTorrent aswell as some other torrentpro grams we wont go into. So install this nifty tool and configure it register to our server and now, now all we need to do is click on a .torrent file on any site and it starts to download on the server.

Very handy and effective.
Next time, we cover the fully automated rss downloading feature in uTorrent. Very nifty when we want to follow a tv-series and such as.

References:
http://www.utorrent.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/addon/7715/

Skydrive on your desktop

A great tool for accessing your Microsoft Skydrive as easily as a local fileshare! Our culprit this time is SDExplorer. Install, logon and you’re online! It appears right in My Computer and works fast while browsing. Speed is as always not much to brag about, about four hours to upload 2.5GB on a 100Mb-connection. Still better than most and less configuring to manage than Gladinet. Works only with Skydrive though.

 

References:

• http://www.cloudstorageexplorer.com/

Handy installation and uninstallation utilities

Clear your computer from unnecessary programs

When buying a new computer, it is very likely that the supplier has attached a lot of programs for you to evaluate. Often, this is applications that we simply do not want. With this begins the tedious work to uninstall the various trial versions of Office Package, antivirus software of dubious character and crapware which we will never use.
A tool to speed up this process is Pcdecrapifier.
No installation required, it is enough to run the file, which can be downloaded from their website.
At boot you choose which programs are undesirable. Thereafter the uninstallation process is started. The advantage of this app is you do not have to click and choose, and choose to wait again. Everything runs on automatic. A couple of OK on the road and your computer is free of crapware, as it so fittingly called.

Speed up installation of common applications and additional

For installation of a new computer, the process of installing some standard programs can be timeconsuming.
This applies primarily to programs such as Java, Flash, Acrobat Reader and Silverlight. Applications that everyone needs right from the start to be able to move around freely on the web. Since this software is constantly updated, it is not practical to package them together. It would then be forced to make a new package each week
This is where Ninite enters into the game. From this page http://ninite.com, you can easily choose what products it is that we want, which is then packaged as a script and downloaded with the selected programs included. The advantage is that you can always download the packages from the web. These are therefore always up to date and then downloads, simply run the script from any PC. To make matters even better so says no thanks Ninite automatically to every conceivable add-on products as they try to cheat on us during the installation of these components. Example of these is the Google Toolbar, McAfee Total Protection, Live Toolbar, etc.
Very practical and effective!

Note: the bad grammar is to be blamed on Google translate. This post was originally published in a small-minded language from the polar regions

References:

• http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/
• http://www.ninite.com/