Microsoft Is Said to Pay Nokia More Than $1 Billion in Deal

AT&T Has Spent Less on Network Construction Every Quarter Since the iPhone’s Launch

This elaborates on why I dropped these fools; even if it cost me some money. It’s great to be liberated from ATT.

New Cloud-based Service Steals Wi-Fi Passwords

Clear your mind, Clearwire and Sprint Nextel say, as they announce the completion of their merger of assets into the new Clearwire to deploy WiMAX across the US under the Clear brand name. Google, Intel, and others chipped in an expected $3.2 billion to fund the first phase.

[From Future of WiMAX is Clear as Sprint, Clearwire close deal]

Martin Beck and Erik Tews have published details of their attacks on WPA wireless networks. The attack is essentially a variant of the chopchop attack used against WEP secured networks, which surfaced in early 2005 [From Security experts reveal details of WPA hack]

“The reports earlier today on WPA’s TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews’s paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn’t been cracked. Don’t believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable.”

[From The Real Story On WPA's Flaw ]

As the new 802.11n spec, with its increased speed, coverage, and reliability, intersects with a broader selection of vendor offerings, wireless is becoming a viable platform for mission-critical network connectivity.

[From 802.11n Is Here. Get Ready For A Wire-Free Enterprise]

A pair of AP stories addresses Boeing’s Connexion failure and in-flight etiquette for Internet access: The AP’s Anick Jesdanun, who has written a series of detailed articles about the bloom in upcoming in-flight broadband and mobile services, files these two articles on specific aspects of the issue. He writes about Connexion by Boeing, a service that more or less worked as advertised technologically–I heard many rumors about problems, but also knew many, many happy users–but that didn’t have the right combination of weight and cost structure to “fly.” As the article points out, and I’ve learned in the last year from extensive interviews, Boeing’s system was out of date by the time it went up, and they had committed early on to extensive, expensive satellite contracts. Rivals and upstarts alike think they have the right combination. Pricing is starting to be disclosed more and more. AirCell is clearly intending to charge about $10 for a domestic flight, which is pretty much what they estimated the cost would be all along. I expect there will be subsidies and deals for frequent fliers, potentially a monthly unlimited subscription (as AirCell has fixed bandwidth costs once the system is built), and partnerships with aggregators to lower costs for corporations. In a related article, Jesdanun discusses whether and how airlines will deal with inappropriate behavior during conversations and in content viewing up in the sky. The various service providers will offer filtering of different kinds: Panasonic Avionics will filter for porn and violence, while AirCell will disable Internet telephony and voice chat. (Those who think you can get around that with a VPN or other purposes just need to remember that service providers can add jitter and such that will make calls indecipherable without affecting other sorts of data transmission.)…

[From Airlines' Sense and Sensibility for In-Flight Broadband]

Motorola has issued a press release summarizing the WiMax achievements that they accomplished in 2007. The company s most prized achievement was the demonstration of the historic first live mobile WiMAX 802.16e handoffs between continuous WiMAX cells supporting voice, data and multimedia applications at the World WiMax Conference held in Chicago in in September. They ve begun deployment of commercial WiMax in numerous countries and are a part of over forty trials currently taking place around the globe. The company also pointed to their partnership with Sprint on Xohm and said that they re fully set to support the upcoming soft launch. The press release indicates that this means the company is on track for significant WiMax progress in 2008 although they predict much of that taking place in Europe and Asia.
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[From Motorola WiMax Deployments on Track for ë08 - Press release summarizes year end achievements]

Hacking Online Banking and Credit Card Transactions – And How to Prevent It

WifiZoo – a Passive WiFi Information Gather:

New WEP Attack: Caffe Latte Hits Client, Not Access Point:

InfoWorld has a write-up on an upcoming Toorcon presentation by Vivek Ramachandran and Md Sohail Ahmad: The AirTight Networks researchers have developed an attack they call Caffe Latte; it uses a laptop’s attempts to connect to WEP-protected networks as the jimmy that lets the cracker into a position to force the laptop to issue tens of thousands of WEP-encrypted ARP requests, which are used to crack the network key.
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Hacking Your Neighbour with Wireless Penetration Tools:

The advent of wireless networking has made sharing a broadband connection a simple task that even your mother can set one up. Its simplicity however is its downfall. How many available wireless networks can you see? Are they taunting you to try connect but guessing someone’s passphrase is not often easy and you wish you had the skills of movie-style hackers just to break your neighbours encryption algorithm for the fun of it? Luckily there are tools that can help you do just that

Hacking Your Neighbour with Wireless Penetration Tools:

The advent of wireless networking has made sharing a broadband connection a simple task that even your mother can set one up. Its simplicity however is its downfall. How many available wireless networks can you see? Are they taunting you to try connect but guessing someone’s passphrase is not often easy and you wish you had the skills of movie-style hackers just to break your neighbours encryption algorithm for the fun of it? Luckily there are tools that can help you do just that

Report: TJX thieves exploited wireless insecurities

A major Linux Wi-Fi driver contains a bug that can allow an attacker to take control of a laptop–even when it is not on a Wi-Fi network.

Forget WEP and WPA; I’m switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently revealed paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks.

A Network Sniffer On Steroids:

Errata has developed a new network sniffer, dubbed ‘Ferret,’ that looks for traffic using 25 protocols, including those for the popular instant message clients as well as DHCP, SNMP, DNS and HTTP. This means the sniffer will capture requests for network addresses, network management tools, Web sites queries, Web traffic and more. ‘You don’t realize how much you’re making public, so I wrote a tool that tells you,’ said Robert Graham, Errata’s chief executive. Errata has released the source code to this version 1.0, ‘feature-poor and buggy’ tool on its site. Anyone with a wireless card will be able to run it, Graham said.

The Assassination of Wi-Fi:

John C. Dvorak from PC Magazine has up an article looking at the new strategy of American cell-phone-service companies. From article: ‘There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We’ve seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone-service companies are no dummies.

Unsecured Networks Open Doors To Crime – Anonymity allows more activity to take place:

Sure, we know that we need to secure our home and business computer networks to prevent obvious computer crimes such as identity theft. But have you ever thought about the number of other crimes which can take place on unsecured networks, including public WiFi spots, because of the anonymity of using those locations for connection? The Washington Post points out that criminals can sit in public spaces and engage in such crimes as online sex solicitation of minors without much fear of being caught for their activities. Even when police become aware of such activity, they may have trouble tracking users and tracing the paths of criminals. One suggestion is for cities with public WiFi to institute filtering systems which scan who accesses the network. What do you think?