Random thoughts and trust-busting
posted on 28 Jun 2005 under category Meta
Pink eye sucks. At least I didn’t get it before the Priest show. Which, by the way, I have NOT forgotten about (how could I!?)… expect a blog/show review of it sometime soon.
My Bahamas cruise is only 2 weeks away. I’m fukkin’ psyched. This weekend is the first live show for Nox Invictus, Toby’s other main band. Unfortunately I’ll be visiting my folks during the July 4 weekend, so I won’t be able to make it. Hopefully he’ll dig up a video camera.
Word on the street is that Ramrod finally knocked out that Chemikiller album Evilspeak. I can’t wait for that. I feel kinda guilty after saying I would record bass for it and then being forced not to - even if the ‘force’ was a bunch of uncooperative PCs. At least it didn’t set him back except time-wise. It would have been a major crime for that album to not come out.
And now, the trustbusting:
I love wireless networking. Imagine chilling out downstairs, curled up on the sofa with the laptop, scouring the web for all manner of information and goodies. “Look ma, no wires!” However, the pitfall is of course wireless security. As it turns out, most of what they tell you to do is useless as hackers know how to defeat most wireless security measures quite easily.
*Disable SSID? - they’ve got network scanners *MAC Filtering? - watch for broadcasts, then spoof the MAC address *WEP Encryption? - Don’t make me laugh. Can be broken by skriptkiddies in about 30 seconds
Fortunately, WPA encryption seems to be very secure and reliable, but is also so new that most older equipment won’t support it - and, even if you get all new equipment, most older OS’s don’t support it. Even if your client software for your wireless card says it allows you to use WPA, if you’re using anything but Windows XP it won’t actually use it. All the support documentation for the various major wireless manufacturers out there say the same thing: if you’re on Win 98/ME/2000, you need a third-party client that will enable WPA support, “such as Funk Software’s Odyssey client”. Go to their support forums/knowledge bases, etc., and everyone from Linksys to D-Link to Netgear and beyond all say the same thing - get Funk Odyssey.
Well, I checked it out - you get free 30 days, then have to pay $50 for the client license. There’s GOT to be some sort of collusion/pricefixing/kickbacks that all of these cocksuckers out there are onto. And don’t bother the sharewarez networks - the only serials out there are for 3.0.3 but Funk just upgraded Odyssey to 4.0.
BUT - we have other options.
http://www.download.com/ is a great, great place for all sorts of software, but it suffers, much like the web itself, from the very thing that makes it great - it’s too fucking big with too much shit on it. Vague searches turn up way too many things to be useful and you have to wade through a lot of crap, but more targeted searches are impossible if you have very narrow requirements but no actual exact keywords to search for.
Unless, of course, someone else has blazed the trail.
So, if you’re on a Windows 2000 machine and want secure WPA support for your wireless network, and don’t want to get assraped for $50, LucidLink Client 2.2 is exactly what you need:
http://www.download.com/LucidLink-Wireless-Client/3000-2155_4-10381499.html
Completely free, fairly easy to configure, and secure. Sorry all you 98/ME people… but I’m sure something else will turn up.
(The links aren’t dead, for a change. It’s weird hearing me go super-in-depth to solve a problem that will almost never happen anymore. It’s kinda like hearing someone describe what you have to do now to hitch your horses to your wagon when it’s cold outside - technology has moved so far beyond that point that you’re almost speaking another language. Progress=good.
Also neat to see the offhand reference to Chemikiller’s “Evilspeak” album. I still rock that one on occasion, and while I knew of a time before it existed, it’s neat to see old, concrete reminders like this. Well, digital concrete, but you know what I mean.)