Bios, blogs and wireless

The last time Tony came down, he left me a book called “Where did it all go right ?”. It’s essentially the autobiography of a guy called Andrew Collins from birth to age 19. I would never have chosen to give this a try without Tony’s recommendation, looking as it does, like some diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest. In fact, it is a diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest but one of the most enjoyable, funny, and insightful books I’ve read for a while. I’ll lend it to you. At the end of it I felt like I knew him intimately – odd when you consider I’d never heard of him a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway – yesterday I heard him presenting “the day the music died” on Radio 2, and I got quite freaked by it. There was this presenter, whose voice I didn’t really feel I knew, but whose friends, family, school-friends, sexual partners, musical tastes, and favourite films were all familiar to me.
Unless he was lying of course.
It made me feel a bit like a stalker or, at the very least, a voyeur.
And you’re reading my blog. Perve 🙂

So I found a couple of interesting blogs yesterday that also give me that slightly unnerving feeling. Chocolate and Vodka is a blog by someone who, like me, doesn’t go out much, favouring prolific blogging, IRC and promoting the Welsh language (she’s not Welsh).
Oblomovka is Danny O’Brian’s blog, and spiffing it is too…if you like that sort of thing.


When we moved in here, I set up wireless and left it wide open to see if anyone would try and take advantage of it. To make it more interesting I stopped it doing SSID broadcasts so the only people who would find it would probably have to looking properly (ie using some sort of netstumbler software).
Last week, we noticed a few people sitting on the wooden bench at the top of our stairs, using laptops. Hmm. I checked the AP logs and sure enough, they were associated. So I set them a few tests. Changed the network name (easyhack@fatsquirrel.org). Took them two days, but they found it again. Next, MAC address ACL. Sadly they never managed to nobble that one. 14^^3RZ!
So, I opened it up again, tcpdumped all of their traffic over 24 hours for later grepping, and then WEPped it up. They’re still trying, bless them, but I don’t hold out much hope.

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