A proposal made earlier this month in Westchester County, NY would require all commercial wireless internet access points to have a firewall to “secure and prevent unauthorized access to all private information that such entity may store” and post a sign stating: “You are accessing a network which has been secured with firewall protection. Since such protection does not guarantee the security of your personal information, use discretion.” Responding to criticism, Westchester County Executive Andy Spano has written a rebuttal encouraging readers to read the legislation and attempting to clear up some misconceptions about the law. I don’t know how far the FCC would let this go, they usually don’t take kindly to local government interference. The legislation seems to be aimed at getting businesses to secure their networks but is legislation really an effective tool for getting this done correctly?
Author Archives: benfranske - Page 22
Unsecured Wi-Fi would be outlawed in N.Y. county
VPN solutions for a mixed client environment
I’ve been thinking it’s time to update my VPN solution so I’ve been poking around looking at current solutions that will work for me. I was excited by the OpenVPN SSL VPN server but I need to support PocketPC clients which they do not and it would be nice if I could avoid installing a client on Windows 2000/XP/2003 machines. Another SSL VPN solution is SSL Explorer.
Jacco has a great page demystifying the setup of Openswan IPSEC VPN servers for use with a variety of clients including PocketPC. Unless something changes or it becomes especially difficult to implement that’s probably the route I’ll go. Nate Carlson has another page about configuring openswan to work with IPSec and L2TP.
Serving DNS with a different twist
I was bouncing around the web tonight and discovered MyDNS which is a DNS server that serves records out of a MySQL or PostgreSQL database instead of with zone files like the common BIND server uses. Interesting idea, I wonder if it scales as well.
PowerDNS is another DNS server application that can read from a SQL database, amongst other formats.
The popular djbdns can be fed with a SQL database via an intermediary application called sql2tinydns this one also has a web interface for management which could be a handy thing.
If you’re looking for a free DNS service, maybe one that provides dynamic DNS or a secondary nameserver, you might want to take a look at FreeDNS by afraid.org. One twist with this service is they encourage sharing subdomains and hostnames on your domain with other users.
If you design it…users will find errors
Mark Hurst has a site called This Is Broken where he takes user submissions of poorly designed products and posts them for the world to see. One of my favorite areas on the site is the signs section where you can find examples of confusing or poorly written signage from around the world. There are a lot worse ways to kill time than looking at this website, if you’re a designer or interested in usability it may even be insightful. Interestingly, the site makes almost no mention of Don Norman and his ideas about affordances though this is much of what he’s talking about.
Standing but not operating
Some weeks ago I was directed to the Heritage USA section of this site. SBNO is dedicated to photographs of amusement parks (mostly in Ohio) that have closed but remain standing. Of course I know about the phenomena of Urban Explorataion, also called UE, and have read the book Invisible Frontier detailing some of the adventures of a New York City UE team. I started scouting around the internet and found a few other interesting sites covering UE or UE related topics.
Defunct Parks has all kinds of information and articles about closed amusement parks including a listing of them by state.
Ruins and Urban Exploration maintains a list of websites and books with additional information on the topic and/or stunning photographs.
The Minneapolis Drain Archive has some information about some early Minneapolis UE expeditions from 1998-1999.
Action Squad is probably the longest running UE team in the Twin Cities though things have tapered off lately. They have an excellent website with detailed trip logs and photos.
Greg Brick has an Urban Speleology site with some information and pictures from caves in urban areas, especially the Twin Cities.
Checking out the latest b2evolution
A few weeks ago I mentioned that b2evolution is working on a new version to address some of the competition from the single user blogging engines. If you want to take a sneak peak at the new version and have shell access to a linux system you can create a directory for b2evo and then issue the following command from inside that directory to get the latest development copy.
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/evocms co -P b2evolution
The Telling of The Time
Old technology is often overlooked as “primitive” or “outdated” but it can be both interesting and enlightening, after all some of our best lessons can be found in history. Genk, Belgium is home to Sundial Park which includes a lot of non-traditional and traditional sundials but one of the more interesting is the digital sundial. Interestingly this is a commercial product and you can buy one for your own home. Other inventors have created a fiber optic digital sundial and a more accurate Thew dial.
Displaying a MySQL Table in PHP
If you’re getting started writing a PHP/MySQL program it’s pretty common to want to dump a MySQL table (as generated by a specific query) to the screen. One of the sites with instructions for doing just that is WebClass.
C6H12O6 -> Cookies
Let’s face it some engineers can cook (some even quite well) but a lot of them are great at hacking code, working differentials or load testing a beam but are completely lost in the kitchen. Those are the folks targeted by the Cooking For Engineers website. It’s a little unconventional, but so are engineers. The site has kitchen equipment reviews along with recipes and instructions. The recipes use photographs liberally along with a unique recipe layout that is supposed to be easier to understand.
The times, they are a-changing
Regular readers might have seen my open letter to ABC affiliates in the wake of the ABC/Apple video distribution deal. It seems that a few of the local affiliates have wised up with their own plans to distribute local programming via the internet. While I doubt local executives read my letter it seems to show that at least some local stations are planning for the future when more and more people become interested in timeshifting via digital downloads.
In further support of my original hypothesis about the decline of appointment viewing and the paradigm shift to digital downloads as a video distribution mechanism AOL has announced a deal with Warner Brothers to distribute classic tv from the WB archives via a peer-to-peer download method.
I can’t say yet specifically what the replacement for broadcast appointment viewing will look like, but it is coming. The WB/AOL annoucement requires custom p2p software and relies on advertising and a yet unknown codec. The ABC deals allow mobile viewing via the iPod’s video capabilities. Podcasters and online only shows such as DigitalLife TV have embraced BitTorrent and H.264 amongst other standard codecs. One thing all these services have in common is that they are a “direct to the viewers” approach that is generally favored by media creators and leaves the old affiliate system of broadcast appointment viewing out in the cold. The genie is out of the bottle.
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