WiFi Net News

pstrongI am compelled to write this story simply to say it does not matter:/strong Reports came out a few days ago that all the iPhone OS applications that sniff out Wi-Fi, scanning the vicinity for signals and other information, have been removed from the App Store, the only authorized place from which iPhone and iPod touch owners can download apps, free or fee. /p pIt doesn't matter, despite all the yelling about it. The sniffers were dropped because they use a private framework, hooks in the operating system that are not documented nor allowed for third-party developers to use. Apple scans and checks for these kinds of uses, and rejects programs that employ them. The sniffers got a pass for some reason, but someone at Apple woke up and kicked them out. It's a shame for the developers who put time into them, but using private frameworks is a completely well-known risk./p pThis dumping of sniffing apps is entirely distinct from Apple's arbitrary and capricious acts related to other programs and categories of programs, in which developers acting in good faith and according to guidelines find themselves on the wrong side of a shifting line. That happened to "sexy" programs, all of which not made by major firms like Playboy and Sports Illustrated, were dropped without warning./p pIt's been suggested that Apple should have an open and closed mode on the iPhone, letting people choose to run apps that haven't been reviewed and filtered by the company, but making no guarantees about those; in the closed mode, only Apple-approved apps would run. Apple seems to have no motivation to make that change, however, with its closed system working just fine for it, if not developers./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/VSVwO2Z7226M82cMGbYtOuQrJQ0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/VSVwO2Z7226M82cMGbYtOuQrJQ0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/VSVwO2Z7226M82cMGbYtOuQrJQ0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/VSVwO2Z7226M82cMGbYtOuQrJQ0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/F0SlIUPmKug" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://kachingle.com/"strongLoyal readers, I'm trying out a new way that you can support this site directly:/strong/a Kachingle just launched, and it's the latest, but most interesting in my view, in a long series of ways in which individuals can push small amounts of money that aggregate into potentially large quantities without much effort. I've tried many of these over the years, but they typically involve too much work on the part of you, the reader./p pThe idea behind Kachingle can be explained in two sentences. You pay Kachingle $5 per month and choose which sites, when you visit them, that you want to support. Kachingle tracks your visits to those sites, and then divvies up your $5 proportionately among your supported sites based on your visits. /p pFrom the user standpoint, you get transparency. You can see how much money I make overall, and how your dollars and cents are being divided. At launch, Kachingle gets 10 percent and PayPal gets roughly 10 percent. As volume increases and other factors come into play, some of those fees will drop. Those fees are taken out after you pay, netting me 80 percent of whatever proportion I get./p pThis site is obviously a labor of love, but I will guarantee that revenue from advertising and other methods is directly proportionate to the amount of time I can afford to write original reporting and analysis. I'm trying Kachingle as one experiment to see whether individual readers of the site who find it useful can, through very small increments, boost revenue enough that I can devote more time to it./p pKachingle is in the early days, so there are few user and few sites using the service yet. That will change, clearly. And the experiment is limited to the $5 you spend each month if you sign up, which make the risk small./p pTo sign up for Kachingle use the badge at the upper left below the site logo, or follow the link in this post./p pA nice side benefit of Kachingle is that the more people and sites that use the service, the more all sites that use it benefit. We can rise the tide for all boats./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HKQwb4pDZwnWL61sFYhV3045yMY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HKQwb4pDZwnWL61sFYhV3045yMY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HKQwb4pDZwnWL61sFYhV3045yMY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HKQwb4pDZwnWL61sFYhV3045yMY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/zM2vNMWZXKo" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/lock.jpg" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" /a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/security-expert-claims-thieves-can-detect-wi-fi-in-sleeping-computers/"strongCredant, a UK firm that sells data encryption tools, claims thieves sniff Wi-Fi in laptops stored in cars:/strong/a I've been letting this percolate for a couple of days in my head, and would appreciate comments from those of you who know the nitty-gritty. Credant is claiming that thieves can use Wi-Fi detectors to find laptops in cars that have Wi-Fi active, because some laptops don't go to sleep for 30 minutes after the lid is closed or sleep is activated. (Thus, Credant says you need to have encryption software installed to prevent access to data, rather than, say, fix your system or add a car alarm.)/p p[Update: Eric Lai has stronga href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9166399/Does_your_laptop_s_Wi_Fi_really_make_it_more_vulnerable_to_thieves_"a terrifically detailed article at Computerworld/a/strong that addresses many of the questions below.]/p pHere's my problems with this scare-via-press release:/p ulliI don't know of any operating system and laptop combo that keeps a machine awake for long after the lid is closed unless the OS is highly misconfigured or there's an error./li pliWi-Fi detectors don't pick up clients to my knowledge, only beacons from access points. (If a client were running XP in its old, bad mode in which ad hoc network names were being advertised, perhaps the laptop would be detectable.)/li/p pliLaptops in a case in a car would produce very little detectable signal, and the Wi-Fi detectors I'm aware of have very little directionality. 2.4 GHz sniffers with two antennas might be far more reliable./li/p pliApple's Wake on Demand feature relies on a Wireless Multimedia Mode (WMM) option which I have no idea how widely implemented it is beyond Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Wake on Demand keeps a tiny bit of juice fed to the Wi-Fi module to listen for a wake command from an Apple base station, but I don't believe the adapter is broadcasting./li/ul/p pAny other ideas? Or is this just plain scaremongering?/p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/PUOHpja16GpRHMjkFs5ADfbqaJk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/PUOHpja16GpRHMjkFs5ADfbqaJk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/PUOHpja16GpRHMjkFs5ADfbqaJk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/PUOHpja16GpRHMjkFs5ADfbqaJk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/ZnkoR-c11rk" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/train.jpg" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" /a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/03/amtrak_brings_wifi_to_the_rail.html"strongA couple of reports on the new service Amtrak launched in the Northeast:/strong/a Amtrak's offering free Wi-Fi in six stations and on the Acela line that runs between Boston and D.C. /p pa href="http://wifinetnews.com/images/2010/penn_station_amtrak_100305.jpg"img src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/2010/penn_station_amtrak_100305_thumb.jpg" alt="penn_station_amtrak_100305_thumb.jpg" border="0" width="240" height="360" style="padding-left: 5px" align="right" //aFrom the Washington Post, a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/03/amtrak_brings_wifi_to_the_rail.html"strongRob Pegoraro runs through some of the details/strong/a he's found out. On trains, streaming services are blocked, and some content is filtered, without complete disclosure. There's no excuse for avoiding full disclosure. Pegoraro saw rates of 1 Mbps down and 200 Kbps up from the aggregated mobile broadband service. /p pNomad Digital's backend is being used, which can take signals from multiple 2G/3G operators to piece together continuous coverage. I imagine the firm uses a virtual network that uses proxies on both ends to allow a continuous IP connection regardless of the intervening network pieces. The user has no awareness of this, and remote sites maintain connections via the proxies./p pThe service in stations is quite a bit higher, with Pegoraro measuring 3 Mbps/600 Kbps. Regular correspondent Klaus Ernst, an inveterate tester of new Wi-Fi systems around Manhattan, measured 8 Mbps/1.8 Mbps at Penn Station. (Splash screen courtesy Klaus.)/p pA a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/skype-on-a-train/article1487226/"strongreport from Canada's Globe Mail/strong/a indicates that Via Rail's Internet service could use more robustness, where cellular doesn't fully cut it. The firm that operates Via, 21net, only uses cellular connections on the Windsor-to-Quebec City route over which Internet is available. That's what the train operator wants. 21net recommends adding satellite for reliability./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DV0x2tu_hMGTZBHYFl8kY-ru05U/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DV0x2tu_hMGTZBHYFl8kY-ru05U/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DV0x2tu_hMGTZBHYFl8kY-ru05U/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DV0x2tu_hMGTZBHYFl8kY-ru05U/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/t6yFyVK634o" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband"strongVirgin Mobile is keeping its pricing tiers for its pay-when-you-need it broadband service, but bumping up included quantities of data:/strong/a Virgin Mobile, now part of Sprint Nextel, has a unique 3G service, in which you can pay for limited amounts of data for limited periods of time. No contracts, and no other fees. And the division is upping the amount of data at each tier starting this morning./p pFormerly, you could pay $10 to use up 100 MB within 10 days; with a 30-day usage period, you could pay $20 for 250 MB, $40 for 600 MB, and $60 for 1 GB. There are no overage fees because you are prepaying for a specific quantity of service. If you need more, you just buy another chunk./p pThe revised plan sticks with the $10/100 MB/10 days tier, but ups the data for each 30-day usage option: $20 gets you 300 MB (only a 50 MB increase), $40 gets you 1 GB (up 400 MB), but $60 now covers 5 GB or 400 percent more usage./p pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/2010/virgin_usb_modem.jpg" alt="virgin_usb_modem.jpg" border="0" width="178" height="405" style="padding-left: 5px" align="right" /The $60 plan is identical in cost and data quantity to the contract-based 3G laptop service provided by ATT, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, but there's no commitment. (T-Mobile also allows you to pay full price for a USB modem and then pay on a month-by-month basis.)/p pI suspect Virgin bumped up these numbers because as a better deal it encourages more regular purchases without feeding out much more data. I suspect most people paying for 1 GB never reach that total, and that offering 5 GB won't encourage much more consumption relative to the jump in usage./p pJust as carriers have all seemed to spawn prepaid, supercheap voice offerings--all fees are collected before usage--I expect we'll see more prepaid 3G, too. Postpaid plans are supposedly billed after the fact, but all the voice and 3G data contracts I know of required a month's advance prepayment of subscription fees, but allow you to run a tab for overages during the month of usage and then pay for those. Hardly postpaid, despite the definition of postpaid./p pThe plans all require the $100 Broadband2Go USB Device (a Novatel Ovation MC760 with microSD slot). The USB modem works over Sprint Nextel's network at EVDO Rev. A speeds where available, and supports several Windows flavors and Mac OS X 10.3 and later. (Some commenters on Virgin's open-answer FAQ say 10.4 is the minimum supported version.)br / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AEs6r7bBvtFd4O6rWabreAjR_UY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AEs6r7bBvtFd4O6rWabreAjR_UY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AEs6r7bBvtFd4O6rWabreAjR_UY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AEs6r7bBvtFd4O6rWabreAjR_UY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/mchAySJMqwQ" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netgear-supercharges-home-theater-experience-with-new-class-of-wifi-products-to-support-internet-enabled-set-top-boxes-tvs-blu-ray-players-and-gaming-consoles-85807792.html"strongNetgear hasn't set the price of a href="http://www.netgear.com/HDWiFi"strongits new paired HD video adapters/strong/a, but promises 99.9 percent reliability for multiple 1080p streams:/strong/a The High-Performance Wireless-N HD Home Theater Kit, which will ship in Q3 2010, uses a 4-by-4 MIMO array to achieve the results Netgear claims, and I'm inclined to believe them. The company says it can push 40 Mpbs across multiple streams using these adapters, with the video sources being the Internet, IPTV systems, or other devices on the network. The adapters plug into Ethernet ports, and have a simple pairing mechanism./p pThe 4-by-4 array over 5 GHz coupled with the paired adapter method means that Netgear doesn't need to focus on throughput but coverage and consistency. The extra antennas let them use space-time block coding and other techniques to boost marginal signals and reduce errors in transmission. The device doesn't compress data, so the entire goal is to achieve sustained throughput./p pOf course, Netgear could charge $500 for the pair, which would make them ridiculous, but I suspect a price closer to $250 based on how other devices have been marketed in the past, and the target audience for these products. A third adapter can apparently be used to extend coverage further./p pNetgear also announced a May release at $79 of the 802.11n (2.4 GHz) a href="http://www.netgear.com/Products/Adapters/RangeMaxWirelessNAdapters/WNCE2001.aspx"strongUniversal WiFi [sic] Internet Adapter/strong/a, a driver-free Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi bridge that can be powered by a USB port even though no data is handled over USB (it saves a power adapter). The notion here is that instead of buying branded, proprietary adapters, you can just plug into Ethernet.br / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FcXGnPACl1RotMCi9wogaJFEK_c/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FcXGnPACl1RotMCi9wogaJFEK_c/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FcXGnPACl1RotMCi9wogaJFEK_c/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/FcXGnPACl1RotMCi9wogaJFEK_c/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/UCvQD3nSxLM" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/train.jpg" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" /a href="http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?c=Pagepagename=am%2FLayoutcid=1241267278292"strongAmtrak's promise last year of putting Internet service in Acela trains happened quite quickly:/strong/a For a chronically underfunded government-like operation, Amtrak managed to get Wi-Fi installed fast in its Northeast high-speed Acela line after it said it planned to do so. The service, free for the interim, is in all 20 Acela trains. Amtrak has also made Wi-Fi service free in the six stations that serve Acela, and in Acela lounges. (The Wilmington Station will get unwired when renovations are completed in early 2011.) /p pAmtrak may wind up using Wi-Fi as yet another tool to bring passengers out of the air and onto the ground. With Wi-Fi at no cost in stations and on trains, the rail operator could use that as a marketing campaign against $7 to $10 per day airport and $5 to 13 per flight airline Internet access, where that's available./p pNomad Digital and GBS Group built the service out. Nomad has a many year history of train-Fi. Nomad and competitor Icomera are responsible for most of the train-based Internet access in the world. A few other firms have disappeared during that time or exited the business.br / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_AUmALrWU6Se7mLUHjARpdWekrM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_AUmALrWU6Se7mLUHjARpdWekrM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_AUmALrWU6Se7mLUHjARpdWekrM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_AUmALrWU6Se7mLUHjARpdWekrM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/vnxB-qArTEc" height="1" width="1"/

pstronga href="http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,40057470,00.htm?tag=mncol;txt"A UK law under consideration and much reviled by privacy advocates would make independent Wi-Fi hotspots legally indefensible:/a/strong The Digital Economy Bill is a particularly odious piece of legislation that attempts to enforce copyright by requiring ISPs to keep records and disconnect customers who engage in such acts. /p pThis puts the government in the business of taking people off the Internet by enforcing actions for what would otherwise be civil violations, previously needing to be proved in court. Now, something approximating an assertion and a few letters could cause an ISP that doesn't respond appropriately to face huge fines and other troubles. A stronga href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law"similar law in France/a/strong was initially struck down as unconstitutional, but was modified lightly before being approved./p pThe reason for these laws is to keep media industries from engaging in publicity-adverse lawsuits against individuals, such as those the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) led against college students, children, and dead people before sputtering out and moving to this approach./p pThe not-quite-unintentional consequence of the UK law would, according to advice provided by an arm of the government, put undue burden on hotspots, libraries, and academic institutions. The law requires that most parties be either subscribers (end users) or ISPs; ISPs primarily provide access, and subscribers use it, although there are some fine points. In either case, copyright holders can notify ISPs of violations who are required to notify subscribers. After a small number of violations, the subscriber can be disconnected from strongany/strong Internet service for some period of time. /p pIf someone downloads an allegedly pirated video over a library, university, or hotspot could force that institution off line if it failed to meet specific notification terms; it's unclear how a hotspot could restrict a banned user without imposing high bars for access, whether free or fee. Larger operations could have login and credit-card verification requirements--used mostly as a way to block people instead of allow them./p pDanny O'Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation stronga href="http://www.eff.org/related/3707/blog"previously raised this concern on 2 December 2009/a/strong in a post to the EFF's site: "The repeated demand by the entertainment industry that intermediaries should police their networks has been expanded by the bill to include the subscribers on the edge of the network. If you're not an ISP, but other people use your network to get their net access mdash; if you run an open Wi-Fi spot, for instance, like the British Library mdash; you'll now be vulnerable to being terminated or constrained by the actions of those users."/p pNone of these efforts, of course, deters privacy. As Cory Doctorow, a UK resident and editor of BoingBoing, stronga href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/27/uk-digital-economy-b.html#comments"wrote about this issue/a/strong: /p p"The Digital Economy Bill is being sold to us on the grounds that copyright infringement harms the British economy because of the importance of our entertainment industry. But while the measures in the DEB won't stop copyright infringement (copying isn't going to slow down -- as computers and the technology they enable gets cheaper and more widely distributed, copying will continue to speed up, just as it has done since the dawn of the computer industry), they will harm British business and British families, by making the Internet generally less useful and more difficult and more expensive for honest people to use."/p pIn the US, we don't have such a law underway--as far as I'm aware--but media firms have stronga href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Testing-New-RIAA-Warning-System-101536"struck deals with some ISPs/a/strong (and some ISPs have refused) to engage in the same sort of behavior without government involvement.br / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/e0LNsSx4o5s0Z-W_VFaRjqSZAVw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/e0LNsSx4o5s0Z-W_VFaRjqSZAVw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/e0LNsSx4o5s0Z-W_VFaRjqSZAVw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/e0LNsSx4o5s0Z-W_VFaRjqSZAVw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/tAuydTxgm3I" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/lock.jpg" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" /a href="http://www.aircrack-ng.org/"strongMartin Beck has an enhanced attack against TKIP:/strong/a One of the two researchers who brought us the a href="http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/11/wpa-cracked.ars"strongTKIP Michael packet integrity attack/strong/a has a refined technique. Beck's paper, "Enhanced TKIP Michael Attacks" [a href="http://download.aircrack-ng.org/wiki-files/doc/enhanced_tkip_michael.pdf"strongPDF download/strong/a], describes how to work around certain assumptions in the MIC (Michael) checksum that's used to ensure a packet hasn't been tampered with to insert truly massive hunks of data without breaking a TKIP key. /p pFor certain kinds of routine network traffic, enough data is already known in the right circumstances to brute force one missing piece and insert from 120 to 568 bytes, if I read the paper right. The Michael checksum isn't changed, but the packet is inserted as a fragment before a correctly checked hunk of data, so the receiver has no suspicion of tampering./p pWorse, this technique can be used in some cases to decrypt data headed to the client, even though the TKIP key hasn't been recovered./p pAs with the previous attack, a lot of stars have to be in alignment. The biggest requirement is that TKIP has be the key type, not AES-CCMP. An attacker has to be proximate to sniff traffic and inject packets. The router has to be running Linux, like many Wi-Fi routers do. The router doesn't need to be compromised; there's a particular Wi-Fi packet sequence that's more predictable, and thus easier to use in the attack. Network QoS (802.11e/WMM) needs to be enabled as well./p pIf you can use the AES-CCMP key type (sometimes incorrectly called WPA2 by itself, but really the more advanced of two WPA2 methods), then you should! All corporations and other entities should already be using AES-CCMP, and with nearly all devices sold starting in 2003 supporting AES-CCMP, even home networks should be able to make that choice. /p p(A reader sent email asking if I wasn't mistaken: doesn't WPA2 only support the AES key? Yes, but it's also backwards compatible. If you have a WPA2 implementation, it may support TKIP unless the router maker has provided an option to lock into using AES only. Depending on the router, you might see "WPA, WPA/WPA2, WPA2" as a set of options, which corresponds to "TKIP, TKIP/AES, AES" for key types; or an explicit menu that lists key types after you select WPA or WPA2.)/p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CidbY0Cz-Gy1pZeKEP_9q7DZ05M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CidbY0Cz-Gy1pZeKEP_9q7DZ05M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CidbY0Cz-Gy1pZeKEP_9q7DZ05M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CidbY0Cz-Gy1pZeKEP_9q7DZ05M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/IW6b5YG8KV4" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02/25/business/AP-US-On-the-Call-Cablevision.html?_r=1"strongWhile T-Mobile's UMA offering has been around for years, Cablevision may be trying something new:/strong/a Cablevision's COO mentioned in the company's earnings call today that the firm is testing phones that will switch seamlessly between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. That sounds an awful lot like UMA (unlicensed mobile access), a standard used for roaming by T-Mobile in the US and several carriers around the world./p pT-Mobile offers UMA because it lets them leverage other companies' broadband and its network of home and roaming Wi-Fi networks. T-Mobile operates relatively few hotspots now compared to when it was anchored by Starbucks, but the key to UMA is voice over Wi-Fi over a wired or wireless broadband connection at home./p pCablevision has an even easier time of it, because it provides its CT/NY/NJ Wi-Fi network only to users that subscribe to its home cable broadband service. So any phone it offers can carry voice over Wi-Fi at home over its cable network and outdoors over its Wi-Fi network. In the past, Cablevision has partnered with Sprint for wireless service. However, I'm unaware of any production UMA gear that would work on Sprint's network./p pThe notion of UMA is to reduce the cost to a carrier of subscribers while providing subscribers with more unrestricted minutes. T-Mobile's plans, for instance, offer unlimited domestic calling over Wi-Fi even for plans with modest numbers of cellular minutes. This keeps customers loyal and happy with a lower cost structure. Femtocells have the potential to offer similar advantages to T-Mobile's competitors, but none are being priced or marketed in that way yet./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jhe3QLhYoum-MLg5A5lt6kUbPaw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jhe3QLhYoum-MLg5A5lt6kUbPaw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jhe3QLhYoum-MLg5A5lt6kUbPaw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/jhe3QLhYoum-MLg5A5lt6kUbPaw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/8QMwVgo9FdQ" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://paidcontent.org/article/419-clearwire-narrows-loss-on-track-in-its-4g-rollout/"strongClearwire says it's on track for 120m people passed in 2010; beyond that, more money needed:/strong/a paidContent.org runs down Clearwire's earnings news, with the firm bringing in $80m in revenue, but a loss of nearly $100m. Subscribers stand at 688,000. The company will spend about $3b in 2010 to get to its target of 120m people to whom service would be available. But if the network is to grow any bigger, more cash is needed./p pIn contrast, T-Mobile has crossed 200m already in upgrading its 2G network to add 3G, and it's ostensibly on track to something approaching ATT (233m) or Verizon (280m) levels. (Yes, those Christmas ads in which Verizon said it has the biggest 3G coverage are correctly, but the 50m gap is in small towns; ATT has the big markets.)/p pClearwire is leaning on Sprint for its fallback position, Sprint being the majority owner of Clearwire. If you get a combo 3G/4G USB modem or portable 3G/4G-to-Wi-Fi gateway, you can use 3G (up to 5 GB on Sprint's network) when away from a Clearwire area, and 4G in the footprint./p pBut Sprint has underspent on 3G. The company reports (the latest number I could find) 270m people passed with 3G emwith roaming/em. That's a critical point. Compare Verizon's native coverage map with Sprint's map, where Sprint shows gray for roaming, orange for 3G and tan for 2G: /p pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/2010/Sprint-3G-map.jpg" alt="Sprint-3G-map.jpg" border="0" width="350" height="192" //p pAnd here's Verizon's, where dark blue is 3G, green is 2G, and yellowish is roaming:/p pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/2010/Verizon-3G-map.jpg" alt="Verizon-3G-map.jpg" border="0" width="350" height="215" //p pSprint has the big cities, sure, but it doesn't disclose its non-roaming footprint, and it limits 3G customers to no more than 300 MB per month of roaming data, after which point it can choose to cancel a mobile broadband contract./p pbr / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p2mjarTEDVTCbtqJCURjcvv9Fz8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p2mjarTEDVTCbtqJCURjcvv9Fz8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p2mjarTEDVTCbtqJCURjcvv9Fz8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p2mjarTEDVTCbtqJCURjcvv9Fz8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/3Z16LokL-Aw" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/plane.jpg" align="right" hspace="5" height="80" width="80" border="0" /stronga href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alaska-airlines-to-offer-gogo-inflight-internet-service-85189942.html"Row 44 loses one of its two announced customers:/a/strong Alaska Airlines apparently tired of waiting for Row 44 to raise the capital necessary to start building out its satellite-backed service, and has chosen to use Aircell. This is a blow for Row 44, which Southwest has picked, but for which we still have no details about financing: will Southwest back the installation, or Row 44 raise private capital? What will Southwest charge for service?/p pRow 44 has only a couple of non-announced airlines to pitch to in the US, and it's likely that airlines that haven't committed aren't planning to until there's more proof that Internet service produces happier customers who pay more for flights--as well as reasonable revenue from the service./p pAlaska will put service on 737-800 long-haul planes first, then roll out fleetwide. The press release is fairly frank in stating why the airline switched: "Their reliable, lower-cost equipment can be installed quickly, allowing Alaska Airlines to introduce Gogo service to our customers as soon as possible." /p p(You can stronga href="http://www.publicola.net/2010/02/24/mile-high-wi-fi-comes-to-alaska-airlines/#disqus_thread"read my full report on this/a/strong, including an interview with Alaska's VP in charge of this area, over at Publicola, a Northwest news and culture site.)/p pI had written in the past that Alaska's choice of Row 44 made sense because of the large number of over-sea routes the airline flies to Alaska and Mexico. However, Aircell will have service operating in Canada as a partner to a license winner at some point (this year?). /p pThat, combined with pointing some antennas at over the ocean, might allow reasonably continuous coverage between continental US routes and Alaska. Mexico is another story, but Aircell hopes to have the same deal Verizon Airfone had in Mexico and the Caribbean to allow use of the same spectrum for which it has licenses in the US./p pAlaska said in the press release, "To ensure the service is available to the airline's namesake state, Aircell will expand its network to provide Gogo Inflight Internet service on flights to, from and between key destinations in the state of Alaska."/p pAircell's Gogo Inflight Internet is on over 700 planes at present. I expect it'll hit about 1,500 planes this year, although the pace of installation could speed up if airlines are happy about uptake and revenue./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wbOHXeLwZcDTK34hZX8M1DOTpdM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wbOHXeLwZcDTK34hZX8M1DOTpdM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wbOHXeLwZcDTK34hZX8M1DOTpdM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wbOHXeLwZcDTK34hZX8M1DOTpdM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/xULn1MVsZXE" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0zt4opqL18feature=player_embedded"strongJennifer calls Leo Laporte's Tech Guy radio show to complain her "linksys" has disappeared:/strong/a She starts by explaining that her "linksys" has gone away, and she bought a USB wireless extender, but it still doesn't show up. Leo asks, wait, do you have a wireless router? No, she's been using this other network./p pLeo explains to her that she's stealing, and exposes herself to tremendous risk by being on an open network. "When you see an access point named linksys, it's usually because the person who set it up is kind of clueless," he notes./p pI like Leo not compromising on the ethics, while offering security advice, and suggesting she get her own connection./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Hj-SL1qN1xht26VlDnt59DWHwNg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Hj-SL1qN1xht26VlDnt59DWHwNg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Hj-SL1qN1xht26VlDnt59DWHwNg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Hj-SL1qN1xht26VlDnt59DWHwNg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/R5fat2j4O_4" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800cdvn=newsnewsarticleid=30358mapcode="strongATT didn't want to let T-Mobile steal the initiative on HSPA 7.2:/strong/a I missed the 5 January 2010 release from ATT that explained the firm had updated its mobile broadband network to HSPA 7.2; T-Mobile said last week its entire footprint is now HSPA 7.2 as well. /p pATT said last year that it would roll out the 7.2 update--which offers a raw data rate of 7.2 Mbps including network overhead--to most sites by the end of 2010, and its entire footprint by 2011. In Europe, HSPA 7.2 networks seem to operate in a broad range: users report regular performance from about 1 to 4 Mbps. It's unclear how carriers will provision, throttle, or shape HSPA 7.2 here./p pATT's announcement coming early made it seem like it might have leapfrogged T-Mobile, given that ATT has more metro areas covered with 3G, and has already sold a fair amount of HSPA 7.2 enabled gear, such as the iPhone 3GS. But that's not the case./p pATT wasn't trying to pull a fast one, even though it was marketing this move as an enhancement. In the 5 January press release, the company makes it crystal clear that it's upgraded the software to allow HSPA 7.2 even though it doesn't have the necessary backhaul improvements in place to make the network actually faster./p pThis is refreshingly frank. The release said that the software update would improve network quality even before backhaul improvements that are slated for this year and next are in place to provide increased capacity. I'm sure ATT is correct. More efficient use of the local link among capable devices means less wasted air time and less congestion, which allows better packet shaping and prioritization. I'm sure local network links function far better at 7.2 Mbps, even if the backhaul can't support the uplink side./p pSix cities have the promised backhaul improvements underway: Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami. The release says the updates are site by site, which means you could experience different speeds driving around the same city while the upgrades are in process./p pT-Mobile, on the other hand, has been building its fresh HSPA network with the notion that backhaul for HPSA+ (21 Mpbs in its version) will be flooding the grid, and thus has the advantage of not having to deal with legacy installations. It has been able to make all its choices about towers with the notion that each base station may need 20 to 100 Mbps of backhaul. (These are guesses; the company hasn't released that information.)/p pI continue to find it ironic that wireless networks rely so heavily on wires./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/to4o8WAEqAySs7--i1bQ5DEXha4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/to4o8WAEqAySs7--i1bQ5DEXha4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/to4o8WAEqAySs7--i1bQ5DEXha4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/to4o8WAEqAySs7--i1bQ5DEXha4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/4DuSCfLUzbA" height="1" width="1"/

pstronga href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/189413/tmobile_usa_to_sell_first_hspa_usb_stick.html"T-Mobile is trying to seize its HSPA+ momentum:/a/strong The fourth-ranked carrier by subscribers in the US, T-Mobile is trying to establish an advantage through its fast deployment of 7.2 Mbps HSPA followed this year by 21 Mbps HSPA+. But you need the proper hardware to go with that faster network, and today's announcement of the webConnect Rocket USB Laptop Stick (no pricing yet) is signaling more to come./p pThe modem won't ship until March, and HSPA+ is available only in Philadelphia so far. T-Mobile said it will focus on bringing HSPA+ to the coasts first, and then move inland. In an interview, T-Mobile said it would have the "majority" of its footprint upgraded to HSPA+ in 2010./p pThe company also stressed its work on backhaul improvements, a bane of the mobile broadband industry. You can have as much bandwidth as you want on the local link between devices and the tower, but then you have to offload that to a core network. Many cell sites had paltry backhaul and it was difficult to bring in more. T-Mobile promised me more details soon, but the company recognizes that you can't advertise a raw rate of 21 Mbps--probably 5 to 7 Mbps to individual users--without having invested on the backside, as ATT has learned to its high discomfort./p pT-Mobile would like bragging rights for having the fastest network, although even with the latest market rollouts, it's still covering just over 200m people in approaching 300 cities. ATT, by contrast, even with its smaller-than-Verizon 3G footprint has 350 metro areas (not just cities) with 3G service, although ATT doesn't seem to discuss people passed with service./p pI keep pressing T-Mobile on its 5 GB monthly bandwidth limit included with all its 3G plans as it discusses HSPA+ plans. The 5 GB limit was a quiet or explicit limit before 3G networks could routinely deliver over 1 Mbps (back in the EVDO Rev. 0 and GPRS/UMTS days), and now it seems quaint even for EVDO Rev. A and regular HSPA./p pWhy give people HSPA+ when, at full speed, they could use up their entire monthly allotment in just over two hours (assuming 5 Mbps average speed)?/p pSo far, T-Mobile just repeats that most of its 3G users consume just a fraction of the 5 GB to which they are entitled each month./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ELwyYfEEk4Mc8jp2a6QfhkS06UM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ELwyYfEEk4Mc8jp2a6QfhkS06UM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ELwyYfEEk4Mc8jp2a6QfhkS06UM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ELwyYfEEk4Mc8jp2a6QfhkS06UM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/mPFA3nqaVfY" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.sagem-orga.com/index.php?myELEMENT=World%20premier:%20Sagem%20Orga%20and%20Telefonica%20turn%20the%20SIM%20card%20into%20a%20Wi-Fi%20hotspotmySID=cbd11aad8770d04adc34f134a0bf442bnew_site_id=2"strongThe SIMFi takes a little bit of effort to wrap one's head around:/strong/a This offering from Sagem Orga and Telefonica, announced at the Barcenola Mobile World Congress this week, puts a Wi-Fi radio into a standard SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), which is used in all GSM devices to authenticate to the network and associate billing information. This allows a 3G feature phone without Wi-Fi built in to become a hotspot, sharing mobile broadband with netbooks, smartphones, and other devices. It's fiendishly ingenious, as it obviates putting a 3G modem into multiple devices while offering "tethering" without a cable./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/av15YguPx5ZlG-f2tJBIIlJz2fE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/av15YguPx5ZlG-f2tJBIIlJz2fE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/av15YguPx5ZlG-f2tJBIIlJz2fE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/av15YguPx5ZlG-f2tJBIIlJz2fE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/A2AHJWmenzo" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://wifinetnews.com/images/muni_icon.jpg" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" /a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/02/15/clearwire-wi-fi/"strongMinnesota Public Radio looks at what WiMax may do to the country's only successful for-fee city-wide Wi-Fi network:/strong/a Brandt Williams examined whether Clearwire's WiMax service entering the Twin Cities could spell disaster for US Internet, which covers about 95 percent of Minneapolis with Wi-Fi service./p pUS Internet charges about $20/mo for a rate of 1 to 6 Mbps downstream, while a href="http://www.clear.com/shop/services/home"strongClear offers service/strong/a for the home for $25/mo for 1 Mbps downstream up to $45/mo for 3 to 6 Mbps downstream (bursts over 10 Mbps) for unlimited use. Mobile plans are $35/mo for 2 GB of use or $45/mo (first six months at $30/mo) for unlimited use. Combined home and mobile plans are avaialble, too, at $50/mo for the fastest home and mobile service./p pThere's still room a value consumer in this space. I would suspect one of the typical 16,000 US Internet subscribers has considered and rejected $40 to $60 per month for bundled and unbundled cable modem service, even though that would be far faster and is generally available in the city. The same subscribers might have a laptop or iPod touch that they use for access with the same account while out and about. /p pBecause $20/mo used to be the baseline for dial-up service, that number still has some resonance in predicting whether people will jump up to the next level. You can listen to the story right here:/p pscript type="text/javascript" src="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/js/swfobject.js"/scriptdiv id="minnesota_news_features_2010_02_12_clearwire_20100212_64s_player"/divscript type="text/javascript"/*![CDATA[*/var so = new SWFObject("http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/s_player.swf", "minnesota_news_features_2010_02_12_clearwire_20100212_64s_player", "319", "83", "8", "#ffffff");so.addParam("quality", "high");so.addParam("menu", "false");so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");so.addVariable("name", "minnesota/news/features/2010/02/12/clearwire_20100212_64");so.write("minnesota_news_features_2010_02_12_clearwire_20100212_64s_player");/*]]gt;*//script/p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nhx-UAmls2jCVkJ-2bi_a6yxkIc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nhx-UAmls2jCVkJ-2bi_a6yxkIc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nhx-UAmls2jCVkJ-2bi_a6yxkIc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nhx-UAmls2jCVkJ-2bi_a6yxkIc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/jnwMukfjyJ4" height="1" width="1"/

pstrongThe LA Times has a pair of articles about the health risks associated with electromagnetic fields (EMF):/strong They're rather thoughtful. The stronga href="http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-electromagnetic15-2010feb15,0,807357,full.story"longer article/a/strong starts by trying to claim that there's a "debate" and that experts "disagree," but then proceeds to present the factually accurate view that there are some researchers and outsiders who challenge the increasing preponderance of research that backs up the lack of a link between EMFs and health effects./p pI particularly like this researcher and his statement:/p piIn the opinion of Ken Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied EMFs since the early 1970s, if such fields were any sort of health threat, scientists wouldn't have to sort through the outer limits of statistics to find trouble. "There would be terrible effects all over the place," Foster says. As no obvious catastrophe has shown itself, "I would tend to think there's nothing there."/i/p pThat's where I keep coming back to Occam's Razor related to EMF exposure. People who claim effects say that there are tens of millions of more people obviously suffering from effects, but the research (described quite well in stronga href="http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-electromagnetic-syndrome1-2010feb15,0,801515.story"the second LA Times article/a/strong) doesn't back this up./p pI would argue that electrosensitivity has been well and truly put to bed, and that means that the effects should show up in cancer studies, given the use of cell phones for longer than 10 years by a significant population. That's not showing up in general work, nor in studies like Interphone, which I wrote about a few days ago./p pOne set of analysis of a segment of the Interphone work showed a possible correlation between use of a cell phone for more than 10 years and, in those people who had certain kinds of brain tumors, the tumor appearing on the same side of the head as those who used a cell phone mostly on that side of the head./p pBut the researchers in that study noted quite clearly that there's a recollection bias. If you have a tumor next to your right ear, and researchers say 10 years or longer ago did you mostly use a cell phone on your right side, the expectation is that people tend to say they used the damaged side of the head./p pI remember the concerns in the early 1990s about ELF/VLF (extremely and very low frequency) EMF produced by CRT-based computer monitors. Studies abounded that showed risks, especially from Sweden, but when you read the studies you found that exposing chicks to radiation at huge multiples of what normal exposure was, or that retrospective studies asked people detailed questions to correlate usage at old video display terminals (VDTs) and miscarriage, without eliminating other risk factors. The research was basically garbage, no link was ever found, and there were no bulges in epidemiology related to CRT use. It was forgotten./p pI expect in time the same thing will happen here. With no smoking guns for cancers, no long-term health effects found, and electrosensitivity isolated again and again from the presence or absence of EMF, in 10 years we won't be talking about this at all./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HwqGQJpu441KykvigeyFj6ryOaM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HwqGQJpu441KykvigeyFj6ryOaM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HwqGQJpu441KykvigeyFj6ryOaM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/HwqGQJpu441KykvigeyFj6ryOaM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/_bVKhIGunIo" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/education/12bus.html"strongPrevalence of laptops makes long bus rides into quiet study halls:/strong/a This is the kind of technology coverage, I'd like to see more of, showing how a couple separate pieces of tech when combined produce a big change in people's lives. Students in Vail, Arizona, ride on a Wi-Fi bus, which uses a mobile broadband router (stronga href="http://www.autonetmobile.com/"Autonet/a/strong) to power their laptops en route./p pThe longer battery life in laptops, which have become ever cheaper, coupled with greater coverage of the fastest flavors of 3G, mean that students can actually get real work done that requires an Internet connection. The bus driver reports less rowdiness, and teachers are seeing more homework./p pFor business travelers, ubiquitous access in planes, trains, buses, and ferries might still mean an extension of the work day instead of a displacement of formerly useless time into productive activities. But for students on buses, the time can be lost--and then displaced into evening hours, reducing their time for unstructured activities./p pLest you think this is a rural issue, my wife recently calculated that when our 5 year old heads to middle school in several years, the busing system would probably require he spend 80 minutes on a bus to get to a school about a 10-minute drive away./p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7saOMQufU8DzWPK-fNlNQ-2VdbI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7saOMQufU8DzWPK-fNlNQ-2VdbI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7saOMQufU8DzWPK-fNlNQ-2VdbI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7saOMQufU8DzWPK-fNlNQ-2VdbI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/Cj5hRTSyiAk" height="1" width="1"/

pa href="http://tools.meraki.com/stumbler"strongMeraki offers up a Java tool for viewing Wi-Fi networks around you:/strong/a The Meraki WiFi Stumbler is a browser-based tool for using your computer's 802.11 adapter to scan the air around you and report the SSID, MAC address (BSSID), 802.11 standard (g, n, etc.), channel, signal strength, maker (if known from MAC address), and security standards used. This is the first browser-based tool that I've seen that replicates the functionality needed to make channel selection and siting choices./p pBecause of the Java requirement, the tool works only in browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari that support Java. For some reason, only Windows and Mac are currently supported; Linux is not, but that might relate to the state of monolithic driver support in the open-source kernel. You can use the stumbler without an Internet connection in Firefox 3.5 only./p pI made a very short screencast showing how it works. Looks like I was wrong in what I said in the screencast: there were simply no 5 GHz networks in the vicinity for a long time (I spotted one later); my desktop Mac does have 802.11n capability./p pobject width="445" height="364"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q4R99BWNzzMhl=en_USfs=1color1=0x006699color2=0x54abd6hd=1border=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Q4R99BWNzzMhl=en_USfs=1color1=0x006699color2=0x54abd6hd=1border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="445" height="364"/embed/objectbr / /p pCopyright copy;2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please a href="mailto:news@wifinetnews.com"notify us/a if you find this content anywhere but at a href="http://wifinetnews.com/"wifinetnews.com/a or a href="http://wimaxnetnews.com/"wimaxnetnews.com/a. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ta4vt4Pi5OKaW0ZFsLUGNhEwDIg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ta4vt4Pi5OKaW0ZFsLUGNhEwDIg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ta4vt4Pi5OKaW0ZFsLUGNhEwDIg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ta4vt4Pi5OKaW0ZFsLUGNhEwDIg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wifinetnews/~4/4b0DG6z54-E" height="1" width="1"/