The dangers of war drivers.

Okay there is a lot of people out their using Wireless access points because their so easy thanks to Microsoft, but are they really safe you might have asked yourself before purchasing one of these in my opinion nothing can beat wired networking in your own house, but you might have a laptop and want to move around well then I would say you do need wireless.
So what security issues does wireless face?
Simple a lot you might of heard of these so called war drivers, these people drive around in their car trying to pick up wireless signals especially unsecured ones once they’ve done this they will begin to sniff your ‘traffic’ passing through your wireless connection this means everything you’re doing is being logged into their computers so lets use a example, your looking at a shopping site like amazon.com while your shopping the war driver is logging things like pages you visit to your login details, once they’ve done that it is possible to do things like change your delivery address then you wont get your stuff and someone else might get it, this can be a pain when you get your bill and find that you’ve lost thousands of pounds, because of one person and their laptop.

Blocking Websites or IP addresses

Their can be many reasons to block websites from your computer such as you want to keep kids from going onto malicious sites or you just want to stop yourself going onto sites, for me I blocked a bunch of shopping websites so I don’t spend any money such as ebuyer.com, play.com and amazon.co.uk.

To block the websites I used something called the host file you will find this in “%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\” for XP machines for other machines you might need to look for it.

To open the file you can double click on it and open it in notepad you will get examples in it showing you how to use it but some people don’t always understand it.

Once inside it you can type in at the bottom of the page “127.0.0.1 example.com” the 127.0.0.1 is your local machine which you are on right now and example.com is the site that you want to block from your machine, so try it out and you will find that the list slowly gets bigger and bigger.

My on the move tool kit

All I need is a USB flash drive 1gb+ now I go through a lot of USB flash drives as you have to keep up with the new technologies inside them now my current favourite is the U3 this is a brilliant invention its like having your own little start menu running from your flash drive.

From this I can fun Opera, Firefox, Putty and trillian so I can keep up with my emails on Opera or surf the net using Opera or Firefox, or if I need to talk to someone fast I can boot up trillian and log into AIM.

Inside the menu you have a Download option allowing you to download new programs from software.u3.com for example you can download a new version of Skype, the best thing of all if your using the download option in the menu it will download it then install it in one go.

Now if you haven’t got a U3 flash drive their are many other options out their one of my personal favourites are portable apps these have a much smaller ammount of programs as it isn’t on a bigger scale of U3 but it is well worth it you can have open office, firefox, putty, Gaim and a couple more just check out portableapps.com

Changing theme

untill I have fixed the previous theme I will put up the old one

Thanks.

I want to use my computer as a telephone: Post II

So my fist product I started looking at was a modem so I could run my phone like through my PC, if you remember the good old days when we was using a dial up connection that is what I’m looking for you can get them pretty cheap now so I just searched modem in amazon.co.uk and found one for around a fiver (Trust MD-1100 56K modem) link is at the bottom of the page with my other products.

So now I’ve brought my modem I need a cable to plug into the modem so unless you have one stashed away in your attic theirs a link next to the modem.

Now my favorite product and most expensive, I want something so I can walk around my house on the phone so it got me thinking about mobile cell phones, they have wireless headphones for sale all around the place using blue tooth so I looked for a wireless blue tooth headset for my PC, so I found a Belkin Bluetooth Headset for about £30.