Article

Free Wi-Fi networks in SF, San Jose join hands through Hotspot 2.0 | PC World

My Comments

The Wi-Fi Passpoint or Hotspot 2.0 technologies have been made available to allow those of us with mobile devices to benefit from public-access Wi-Fi without having to deal with Web-based sign-in routines every time we want to use these facilities. But they have been pitched primarily at mobile phone operators and ISPs who want to offer Wi-Fi service for their subscribers.

But San Francisco and San Diego have implemented this technology as part of their free public-access Wi-Fi setup, which I see as being a first for this class of public-access Wi-Fi. Typically these services implement a Web-based login routine which occurs at the start of each session and this may be provided in order to assent to the service’s terms and conditions. With these setups, it becomes impossible to continue a usage session even if you move out of the network’s scope temporarily and it also becomes impossible to roam between the different locations ran by the service without having to log in again.

What they have done is to prove that the Wi-Fi Passpoint or Hotspot 2.0 technology can work well with single-location or multi-location public-access Wi-Fi setups whether free-to-access or pay-to-access. For example, a chain of restaurants, a public-transit system or a community Wi-Fi setup can benefit from this by allowing the users to move between locations without a need to log in again.

The next question that may be raised is to simplify the provisioning experience, especially when it comes to provisioning the same service across multiple devices owned by the same user. This may range from setups where you simply assent to terms and conditions through services where you establish a session-based account like most docket-based hotspot setups to the services offered by WISPs and telcos which are based on an existing customer account.

Who knows, this could be the trend for easy-to-use secure public-access Wi-Fi as different scenarios are being tested.

Article

Germany dumps Verizon for Deutsche Telekom over NSA spying | The Register

Previous Coverage on this topic

The French Have Fielded Another Alternative To TrueCrypt

My Comments

The fallout from the NSA spying issues has effectively put Europe on notice. Previously, with the cessation of development for the TrueCrypt,encryption engine, the French and Swiss have worked on their own forks of that engine to keep it alive and to European values.

Now the German government have dumped Verizon Germany and shifted their general communications-technology business from Verizon Germany to Deutsche Telekom, although they implement the latter for their classified-communications needs. This is a country who was bitten twice by the menace of “big government” through the Third Reich and the West-Germany/East-Germany split and fell victim to Angela Merkel, their Chancellor, being spied on by the NSA.

As well, the European Union litigated for European citizens to have the “right to be forgotten” by enforcing Google to obliterate search details on a individual European citizen at their whim. There is even talk of allowing European-Union citizens to litigate in US courts against American-based companies who violate European privacy norms.

Could this mean that one or more European-based companies or consortiums establish search-engines, online-storage services, online-advertising networks, social networks or similar services making sure that this service conforms to and represents European values? Similarly, could people, companies and organisations around the world, like the SBS in Australia, who fear the kind of spying in the US while supporting and underscoring European values end up deserting American companies and start doing business with European businesses when it comes to their information and communications technology needs?

Article

Great gadgets: Solwise antenna and wifi hotspot | John Norman’s Blog

From the horse’s mouth

Solwise

Wireless 11n USB CPE with built-in 12dBi antenna GBP£41.08

Solwise Wireless USB repeater GBP£47.75

System total GBP£88.83 VAT and delivery to UK included

My Comments

There are those of you who use a caravan, motorhome or other similar recreational vehicle as the mobile holiday home and are likely to spend time at caravan parks or campgrounds rather than set up somewhere like at the beachfront or the bush. Increasingly these places are offering a public-access Internet service with Wi-Fi either as part of the package or for an extra charge, in order to make themselves relevant to the “switched-on” traveller.

But the problem with gaining access to these Wi-Fi services from your caravan is that your site may not be in a position where you can gain reliable reception of that service. Similarly, the vehicle’s metalwork will also play a part in attenuating the Wi-Fi signal that gets in to the van.

You may think that the typical Wi-Fi range extender may cure this problem but most of these devices have integrated antennas which may not be all that “crash-hot” when it comes to picking up the Wi-Fi network’s signal properly. But the clever people at Solwise have partnered a pair of devices that can bring the Wi-Fi network in to the caravan wherever you are.

The first device is a USB Wi-Fi network adaptor with a 12dBi panel aerial. This single-stream 802.11g/n device can be mounted outside the vehicle or building and connected to a regular computer via its USB socket using a 3 metre USB cable. The second device is a dual-WAN 802.11g/n wireless router with a choice of Ethernet or USB serving a wireless-broadband modem for its WAN / Internet service. But it also is able to work with the abovementioned USB Wi-Fi network adaptor effectively as a router.

On the LAN side of this router, you have a separate Ethernet connection along with the Wi-Fi network offered by the device. This earns its keep not just with smartphones and tablets but also with devices like network-attached-storage units, printers or DLNA-capable media devices because this means that you are not dealing with having to log on to the venue’s public-access Wi-Fi network to run these devices or share their resources through that network.

Being a two-part setup, you you can locate the network adaptor outside the vehicle and plug this in to the router’s USB port to effectively “bring in” the Wi-Fi service. It is also designed to support the “quick set-up quick tear-down” requirements that these kind of travellers would need and there are accessories available through Solwise to provide a semi-permanent mount for the USB network adaptor.

According to the screen shots in the manual, there is apparently a “bridge” mode to allow the router to be an extension access point that plugs in to your Ethernet or HomePlug AV(2) wired backbone. This could come in handy at home for extending that wireless network but I am not sure how this is implemented fully, something which could be written up on further.

It sounds like Solwise are fielding another device which would have some utility value when it comes to having that small network how you like it.

Article

La MiniStation Air 2 sans fil de Buffalo | Ere Numerique (France – French language / Langue Française)

From the horse’s mouth

Buffalo Europe

Product Page (MiniStation Air 2 – HDW-PDU3)

My Comments

Buffalo is raising the bar when it comes to the wireless network-attached storage device. These devices typically have a capacity of up to 128 Gigabytes due to their implementation of a solid-state drive and observed limitations such as working either as direct-attached storage for a regular computer or their own Wi-Fi network for mobile devices that ran an app supplied by their manufacturer.

How are Buffalo raising the bar here? They are offering two variants of this NAS – one with a 500Gb hard disk and another with a 1 Terabyte hard disk. It works to the Wi-Fi 802.11g/n standards including support for dual-stream (theoretical) 300Mbps bandwidth. Like most devices in its class, it can stand between another Wi-Fi segment like your home network or hotel-supplied Wi-Fi Internet service and effectively bridge the other network’s services to the network it provides.

On the other hand, it can be connected to a regular computer as an external hard disk using the USB 3.0 connection which most newer computers have at least one of. When you use it wirelessly, you will need to use Buffalo-supplied apps to shift files between the MiniStation AIr 2 and your mobile devices, and I am not sure whether this implements SMB/CIFS to transfer files between a regular computer running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux and this device via its Wi-Fi network. But, from what I have read, it does use DLNA to stream multimedia files to client devices like Internet radios.

Let’s not forget that it can house half a day’s worth of power on its own battery and Buffalo reckoned that it could charge two smartphones.

Personally, I see this raising the stakes with storage capacity, wireless bandwidth and battery runtime along with the ability to implement DLNA media serving. If Buffalo could take steps to have devices of the MiniStation Air 2 able to work with a “master” network like your home network for “picking up” content and other files without having to be tethered to a regular computer, it could become a useful device to take network-hosted content on the road. The capacity that this unit offers is also a sign of things to come for mobile computing.

Articles

QNAP Launches the Rugged & Fanless NAS IS-400 Pro for Industrial and Surveillance Applications | Hardware Heaven

QNAP ships ruggedized IS-400 Pro Turbo NAS for industrial environments | Electronista

From the horse’s mouth

QNAP

Press Release

IS-400 Pro NAS Product Page

My Comments

QNAP have released their first network-attached-storage appliance that is specifically designed for rugged environments like factories or warehouses. But this unit has a certain appeal for the direction towards the up-and-coming in-vehicle network trend.

The IS-400 Pro four-bay NAS is designed as a fanless unit that makes use of its steel housing as a heatsink for its components. This made me think of the unit looking like one of those aftermarket car-stereo amplifiers that young males install in their cars to make their car stereo sound louder and boomier to impress their mates. As well, the way the components are mounted inside the unit to resist vibration and impact, making it suitable for in-vehicle use like those amplifiers. Even the provision of a secondary power connection block allows for failover power-supply setups or in-vehicle setups where ignition-switch following is important.

It can house up to 4 of the 2.5” hard-disk or solid-state drives used in portable computing applications, running them in varying RAID or JBOD configurations and works under the QTS 4.1 operating environment. This ties in with a plethora of apps that make it work well as a server for your home or business needs, whether as a network video-surveillance server, backing up computer data, being a file or data server or even working as a mobile DLNA media server.

Personally, I could see the QNAP IS-400 Pro validating the concept of a NAS design that is pitched for industrial, mobile and similar installations. Here, it would play its part with the trend where your vehicle or boat will have its own small network that is effectively the extension of your home or small-business network for both work and pleasure.

Hi all!

You may have come in to this site either via a Web search, an email or from the URL that you may have copied from posters, cards and other offline advertising that I may have put up around town; and have found the site of interest. But you don’t have the time to keep checking on it for newer articles.

There are three ways to follow this site so you don’t miss the latest articles:

1. RSS feed (Webfeed) – You can subscribe to an RSS feed using your feed reader or online news-aggregator service. The feed reader can be presented as a function of an existing program such as your operating system, Web browser or office software; or available as a standalone desktop or mobile app. On the other hand, you may visit your news-aggregator service via its Web page or a dedicated app.

Your browser or other app may highlight the orange RSS icon to indicate that there is the Webfeed to subscribe to. Click on this to start subscribing with your browser’s feed-reading function.

For other applications, the URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/HomeNetworkingAndItInformationAndDiscussion

This feed is updated as and when new articles are published.

Those of you who used to use Google Feed Reader may find it useful to use Feedly and I have provided a “one-click” subscribe option for you to follow this site on Feedly. Here, you can view the feeds on your regular or mobile computing devices using Feedly apps that provide an optimised view for your mobile devices or using the www.feedly.com Website on your regular computer.

2. Your email inbox. There is an option to subscribe to this site so you have new articles appear in your email inbox. This will be provided in the form of a “Subscribe” form located in the sidebar on the right hand side of your page in the standard view and you fill in your email address, with a CAPTCHA-protected “opt-in” form popping up when you click the “Subscribe” button. Another way will be to visit this URL:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=HomeNetworkingAndItInformationAndDiscussion

The confirmation message

When you fill in your email in either of these forms, you will get a confirmation email from Feedburner Email Subscriptions which has a link that you must click on in order to start receiving the latest articles in your email inbox.

Check both your inbox and your “junk-mail” or “bulk-mail” folder for this confirmation message because some junk-mail filters may treat this message as a “junk-mail” or “bulk-mail” message.

Sharing your email subscription or having the latest articles available in your organisation or workgroup

Some of you may want to share the subscription with other people, making sure it comes in their email inbox. Or you may want to have the articles come through your “catch-all” corporate or workgroup email address which will appear in everyone’s email inbox in your workgroup or organisation. Here, you fill in that other person’s email or the “catch-all” email address in the “Subscribe” form.

But remember to let this other recipient that you want to invite know that you are signing them up. Tell them to expect the confirmation email that is mentioned above in their Inbox and to click on the link in that email to get the ball rolling.

The recipient of that email will receive the above-mentioned confirmation message and they can click the confirmation link in that message to start receiving the articles in their Inbox. If the address in question is a “catch-all” address, the first recipient of that confirmation message who clicks the link in that message will cause the articles available in all email accounts able to receive email from that address.

The emails come on days where there are new articles posted and if two or more articles are posted on the one day, you will receive one email with all the articles.

3: Facebook Feed: If you are a member of Facebook, you can follow this site by either scrolling down to the “Visit this on Facebook” box and clicking the “Like” button in that box or visiting this Facebook page.If you haven’t logged in to Facebook at that point, you will be required to log in.

Subsequent articles will appear in your Recent Items Facebook list under “HomeNetworking01.info” and you will have the introductory text of the article as the copy so you can follow through and continue reading it at the site. This may not be feasible if you are checking your Facebook account from a device that doesn’t start a Web-browsing session when you click on a link.

These articles will appear as and when new articles are published.

At the moment, there isn’t the ability to start email or Facebook subscriptions from the simplified mobile user interface unless you click on the links in this article. You may have to click this link or click the “Go to Desktop View” option at the bottom of the page to open the regular view for creating an email or Facebook subscription. This will be a problem if you are viewing this from an Android or other tablet which shows the mobile view by default.

I hope this is of use to you as you keep following this site and reading the articles written within.

With regards,

Simon Mackay

Article – From the horse’s mouth

Barclays Bank

Special offer for Barclays Bank online customers

My Comments

In 2009, I had reviewed a copy of Kaspersky Internet security and had found that it was the start of things to come for a capable desktop-security program. Then I had read some comparisons of various desktop security programs and found that this same program was doing its job without trading off performance unlike the Norton software where I have heard complaints about sluggish performance. Lately, I have even recommended this program as a desktop-security solution for people who have asked me about their home-computer security needs.

Barclays, a well-known UK bank who had been the victim of a “distraction-burglary” hacking scam, has now offered a partnership deal with their online-banking customers by offering free copies of this software. This also applies to those of us who have continued a subscription with Kaspersky for the software and the subscription is up for renewal.

What I like of this is that Barclays have led the field by a partnership with a desktop security software vendor to protect their customers from the varying forms of malware that can compromise the sanctity of their customer’s banking and personal data.