Recently my girlfriend and I moved into a new apartment on Milwaukee’s Lower East Side. We had been using an old Linksys router at our previous quarters but with the new apartment only having a single cable drop in the most inconvenient location possible, we decided to go wireless. I had never used a wireless router at home before so I had a lot of research ahead of me. We wanted speed, range, security, and as inexpensive as possible. We ended up purchasing the Linksys WRT54G2 router due to it being a middle-of-the-road wireless router. The WRT54G2 uses 802.11g, contains two internal antennas and has an output power rated at 18 dBm. These characteristics met our first two requirements but what was there for security? The router offers WPA2, WEP, Wireless MAC Filtering and can use security keys of 128 bits. This seemed like the standard suite and the router was within our price range.

Setting up the router was easy and once everything was in working order I decided to start tinkering with its configuration. Under the Wireless Security settings I noticed a few interesting options. The ‘Security Mode’ option allowed me to select Disabled, WPA Personal, WPA Enterprise, WPA2 Personal, WPA2 Enterprise, RADIUS, and WEP. If I selected WPA Personal I noticed that the ‘WPA Algorithm’ option would set itself to TKIP with no other option. If I chose to use WPA2 Personal I was given a choice of AES or “TKIP+AES”. Having only dabbled with cracking WEP networks before I was curious as to what TKIP was.

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I am a baseball fan. I absolutely love the game of baseball and this has been the case since I was a child. Baseball was the first organized sport I played and without attempting to be cocky, I was damn good at the game. Unfortunately as I grew up other things took precedence over baseball and I abandoned playing the game. I did not, however, completely abandon baseball. To this day I still follow my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, and everything else that happens in baseball. I wouldn’t say I take it to an extreme but I even have a favorite baseball column written by Jayson Stark of ESPN (especially the Useless Info articles).

I’m also always intrigued and fascinated by anything mechatronic. Like most people, I’m also curious about the world of spies and secrecy. I think those of us involved in the information security realm share these two common interests. So when I read or hear the media using the term “hacker” in a negative manner it’s somewhat unsettling.

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Google introduced Chrome OS yesterday and it should be available to the public in the second half of 2010. Does anyone else feel somewhat violated by this or is it just me? It’s bad enough Google wants to control my personal and domain email with Gmail, schedule my days and weeks with Calendar, update me on my financial life with Finance, know where I want to go with Maps and Google Earth, and store my medical information with Medical Records but now they want to do this the instant I boot my computer? Will I need to provide a DNA sample in order to login to Chrome OS?

From the official Google blog post: “So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System.” How is that a natural extension? That’s like an automobile tire manufacturer suddenly saying they’ve developed a new kind of car because it’s a “natural extension”.

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