endellion.me.uk June 26 2007
My Rogue Wireless Access Point (page 2)
It is not even August yet, and I have "customers" galore. So many in fact, that I have changed the setup slightly. Out goes ZoneCD, in comes the community edition of ClarkConnect. This is an all-in-one firewall product which is just as easy to run and way more easily configurable. Check it out on their site: http://www.clarkconnect.com/. It also has the advantage of always giving the same IP to the same user without messing about.
ZoneCD wasn't really the right product for me anyway, as I was never going to use their strengths which lie mainly in authentication. I want people to come along freely without hindrance (apart from the industrial-strength site blocking, of course). ClarkConnect has an easy-to-use web interface which allows me to block and unblock ports and sites and users and whatnot on the hoof.
Not all of my "users" have twigged to this rather dramatic change though. The main complaint I read on their MSN chatterings is the fact that so many desired web sites are blocked. Some users even go as far as to google the problem to see what can be done. "ZoneCD" is still being googled, so they have remembered it from when it used to be shown on the login page.
A lot of the "users" are somehow quite proud of the fact that they're getting internet for nowt, and like to make out that this was somehow an effort on their behalf. Like they have "broken in" or something... Yeah right...
The main thing these kids want is illegal downloads, and they use those sucky limewire and bearshare programs to do it. Evil little bastard programs these are too, having been designed with firewall-circumvention in mind. Almost as evil as AOL.
Amy
Amy is to all intents and purposes a bit of a clicker. When I put myspace back in the list of allowed sites, she went on it right away, only to get a message from myspace stating that she had been phished and needed to change her password before she could do anything. The beauty of myspaz is of course that it transmits those passwords in the clear. So she went from one weak password to another. And I thought myspaz now required at least a numeral?
Before having to fall in line with some of the policies here, Amy was an AOL user. Why anyone would want to use the advertisement-peddling aol envelope for their internet experience is totally beyond me. In the first place she's not using AOL infrastructure (but be* --so far the best ISP I've ever been with, fingers crossed) and in the second place even if she were, AOL scrapped that requirement quite a while back. The AOL browser is hellish. Once the computer starts, AOL browser starts, and it cannot be persuaded to stop. It attempts a connection with aol.com. If that fails, it wants to connect to aol.co.uk. Failing that, it tries aol.akadns.com. And so on, and so forth. In the first instance all these connections are UDP, but when it comes to realise that no UDP ever comes back (mainly because I knocked that one on the head straight off on account of all the file sharing also using udp) it will happily try TCP instead. And if after ten minutes or so it still can't connect, it attempts to send a diagnostics packet to its masters, which includes not only the user's computer details, but also all it has managed to gather from the Wireless Access Point, including SSID and MAC. I found that a tad invasive, really.
Amy finds a lot of succour in pornographic materials. It is not for me to judge whether 20-year-old girls should be exposed to porn. That is, unless they're on my line. And dansguardian is quite good at keeping porn at bay. Having said that, she still managed to find two or three sites that weren't on the built-in list, and which managed to evade the dynamic filter by only having pictures. Even the words on the site are really pictures. As I said, sites can easily be added to the blacklist, so they were. Which got Amy into a frenzy of scouring around for porn. In fact she got so desolate about the newly-acquired cleanliness of her computer that she approached her friend Richard for help.
| 2007-06-15-01-42-59:
oh amd next time your on i need to pick your brains!!!! i cant get on to sertain web pages coz apparently they are band!! 2007-06-15-01-43-15: and i dont know why!!!! 2007-06-15-01-44-29: so i will let you rest for now and hope you have a good day tomorow |
Unfortunately she didn't make good on that. It was to be quite a few days later before the actual help session began.
According to his publicly available information (myspace mainly, and some other sites he contributes to) Richard is doing a degree in computing. Here follows his expert analysis. It has to be said that Amy doesn't supply an awful lot of information for Richard to go on, but then again, Richard doesn't ask an awful lof of questions either. I get the feeling that he didn't even particularly want to to help her.
2007-06-20-19-44-16 amy: hello myster criptic! 2007-06-20-19-45-31 Richard: hello# 2007-06-20-19-47-23 amy: i have a problem and i was wondering if you could help me please! 2007-06-20-19-55-00 amy: the contebnt filter on my explorer is blocking random sites and i cant disable it........any ideas? 2007-06-20-19-55-59 Richard: lower the level of security 2007-06-20-19-56-42 amy: tryed that.....anything i try on internet options dont work! 2007-06-20-19-57-14 Richard: is it a seperate security thing? 2007-06-20-19-57-30 amy: no idea! 2007-06-20-19-58-01 Richard: lol helpful 2007-06-20-19-58-15 Richard: it might be ya firewall settings 2007-06-20-19-58-20 Richard: or another program settings 2007-06-20-19-58-26 Richard: mainly a virus checker 2007-06-20-19-59-30 amy: right i shall hsve a look ....it was fine a couple of weeks ago then decided i wasn't allowed on the main sites i use! 2007-06-20-20-00-56 Richard: k |
I'm at a loss to explain the notion that "it was fine a couple of weeks ago". As I have never run this set-up without filters, she must have been using someone else's access point and not realised that she switched over here at some point.