Practical Technology

Recently, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a $25,000 fine against Google for “deliberately impeded and delayed” an ongoing investigation into whether it breached federal laws over its street-mapping service that peeked in on open, unencrypted, Wi-Fi access points (AP). Read that again, Google wasn’t fined for collecting and storing data from unencrypted wireless [...]

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Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CISRO) has snatched picked up $229-million from technology companies for their Wi-Fi patent. This time around, CISRO hit up Lenovo, Acer, Sony, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. These companies settled with CISRO rather than face in the infamously pro-patent Eastern District Court of Texas, United States. This isn’t the [...]

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To network equipment we used to drag yellow cable about the size and flexibility of garden hose through buildings’ plenum spaces. It was an ugly job. It got better. Then, we got wireless networking and setting up networks got much easier. Still, physical networking usually delivered faster speeds than Wi-Fi networking. Now, things are changing. [...]

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I’ve never trusted Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) on my Wi-Fi access points (AP) and routers. I’ve always thought that anything that was that easy to set up had to be easy to hack. It turns out my gut was right. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has confirmed that security researcher Stefan Viehböck has [...]

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This summer it was revealed that Google Street View cars, besides taking photos of your neighborhood, were also collecting the street addresses, Wi-Fi service set identifier (SSID), and the unique Media Access Control (MAC) identification information for computers, Wi-Fi access points (AP)s, and routers. Worse still, Google was, apparently by accident, also grabbing unencrypted passwords [...]

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