Well, believe it or not, I finally received my Logitech diNovo Media Desktop (keyboard and mouse)!!! I have to say, it’s pretty darned cool – looks totally awesome and works a treat.

On the suggestion of a couple of reviews I’d read around the place, I didn’t bother installing the Logitech Media Desktop, which looked like a bit of a joke, and I skipped using MusicMatch Jukebox because I’d rather use WinAmp, but I suppose I can live with Windows Media Player (so that I can use the Media Pad to control playback etc).

So – the installation you ask? Well, it wasn’t too bad, but I did get a bit frustrated because at the end of the process (I actually did install MusicMatch, but then removed it again), the installation of MusicMatch, which is supposed to be completely integrated… crashed. Nothing nasty like a BSOD, it just sat there for an inordinate amount of time, until I called in the friendly neighbourhood Task Manager and politely asked the installer to leave. On top of that, it doesn’t currently appear to want to uninstall cleanly, so I might actually have to run the install again, just so that I can get it to install properly… so that I can uninstall it. The irony.

Apart from that – it’s a very cool combination, and so far I’m liking it. I think the control of Media Player from both the Media Pad and keyboard (they both have the media wheel thing) is awesome, and the display of current playing details on the Media Pad is a very nice touch. It’s also pretty cool that you can hit a button and turn it into a navigation pad (Windows key, arrows etc) or a stand-alone calculator, but they are just extras given the package you’re getting already.

Now I just have to wonder if there’s anyone out there snooping every letter I type?…

I was having a look on TechRepublic and found some good articles about wireless technology (just search for ‘wireless’ on their site);

• Home WLANs create exposures in enterprise LANs
• WPA wireless security offers multiple advantages over WEP
• Wireless LAN security Q&A

Here’s a question for anyone out there who’s ‘wireless-security-minded’. If you have to choose between the 2, are you better off having WEP enabled on an access point, or only allowing trusted stations to connect (via MAC-address restrictions)? Obviously it’s better to have both, but if you can only have one, which one is more secure?

I was thinking that if you couldn’t get WEP to work for whatever reason, then it might be ok to just configure your WAP to only accept connections from certain MAC addresses. This would mean that the data wasn’t encrypted in transmission, but wouldn’t it also mean that people couldn’t snoop your traffic, because they couldn’t connect in the first place? Or am I missing something?

The down-side is that if (somehow), an outsider knew the MAC address of your machine/network adaptor, then they could use something like SMAC to spoof it and connect to your WAP.

WEP is supposed to be pretty insecure, and tools like AirSnort can be used to determine the encryption key given enough sample data, so is it really worth the effort? (unless you’re regularly cycling your keys perhaps?)

Any thoughts out there?

This post was inspired by an email from David W (who I can’t reply to for some reason – the email is not getting through). I wanted to have a quick look around the place to see what software is available for stumbling/wardriving/network scanning etc. Here’s what I came up with;

Net Stumbler

The pre-eminent stumbling program for Windows machines, Net(work) Stumbler appears to support a wide variety of wifi cards, presents useful information (including a graph of signal strength over time) and supports GPS input to pinpoint the location of the WAPs you are detecting. I use Net Stumbler with my Netgear WG511 card, on a Sony VAIO laptop, running Windows 2000 and it works excellently (including GPS data now!)

Kismet

As far as I know, Kismet is the favourite *NIX stumbling/scanning tool, and “supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic”

MacStumbler

“MacStumbler is a utility to display information about nearby 802.11b and 802.11g wireless access points”. Apparently works with Apple Airport Card and MacOS 10.1 or greater.

There are heaps more than those ones, but they are the big-boys as far as I can tell. As I mentioned, I use Net Stumbler, because I have a Win2k laptop, and it works with my card. So far, so good! I’d like to hear what other people use and any problems they’ve run into with certain packages?