Real World Computing
Grumpy old men
To describe his behaviour as "somewhat unthinking" is about as charitable as I can be under the circumstances. This chap certainly may have praiseworthy talents, and enthusiasm, but everything that he's been taught - in the sense of casual, shared background wisdom - has led him to believe that BitTorrents are the best and most worthy way to move data around, so you can escape the clutches of "the man" and offer your information to the world in its purest state as a free resource. The very notion that he's actually employed by a business, and that said business has to find a way to make money, is anathema to him, so to go further and observe that the network (and that includes the WAN) inside that business is mostly designed to keep all that data safe is simply never going to reach him even as an idea. He's never chatted with his pals on MSN about anything of that sort: after all, if you're permanently connected to your peer group by ever-present links, outside influences and information have a much lower chance of penetrating or changing your mind.
Why I hate wireless
It may not seem especially relevant to informing decision-making in small networks to let you know that there's no Wi-Fi network in the convention centre in Cannes, but please bear with me. As the centre filled up with eager VMware aficionados in February, so the apparent wireless service facilities changed almost by the minute. One could be forgiven for thinking that the displayed list of Wi-Fi base stations and networks were a public service provided by the organisers, but that would have been an error - it turned out that a sufficient number of attendees at the conference, or people in cars sitting just outside, thought it would be a jolly jape to pretend to be a public access point. Anyone who fakes a service like this gets to store, and later trawl through, all the data packets that pass through their machine, which is just the sort of circumstance where an unwary use of online banking or the reviewing of a sensitive email could prove disastrous.
What really annoys me about this scenario is the sheer lack of sensible and deployable countermeasures. I sat behind delegates whose Linux laptops were merrily scanning away with their Wi-Fi aerials, and in the end this turned into a kind of virtual ping-pong game as the hacker dudes vied to dodge one another's scanners, to spoof well-known public service names, and to ensnare the data of the less-paranoid laptop surfers in the auditorium.
Thinking about the nature of the Wi-Fi signal, I can see how anyone trying to track or to enforce "clean air" might well have to run around the auditorium wearing a beanie-hat with antennae poking up above their ears. The fact is, however, that no matter how absurd the equipment used, the end result of spotting those who are happy to play data thief while pretending to be listening attentively to Germans driving PowerPoint presentations, would be well worth the sartorial embarrassment...
Two questions crop up almost the moment one thinks about this problem. The first one is, why doesn't a 4,000-seat conference centre in the poshest town on the French Riviera have its own wireless service in the first place? Secondly, why is it so hard to find devices that actually help with this problem?
The basic problem seems to be compounded by misleading advertising - you won't find much if you search for "pirate wireless station identifier" online, but you'll end up striking what looks like gold should you, by some astonishing feat of lateral thinking, try a search for "perimeter security". Now to my mind the concept of "perimeter security" brings up mental images of Guantánamo Bay or the Berlin Wall, and the very last thing you can say that a wireless network possesses is any "perimeter". If you'll forgive the earthy Joyceian simile, that would be like saying that a fart has a perimeter, and if that makes you wrinkle your nose in disgust and disapproval, then I'm sorry but that was my intention - that's exactly how you should feel about irrational concepts like a "wireless perimeter".
