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April 29, 2008
Your Chatty, Treasonous iPhone & Notes from Interop
Rich Mogull on his iPhone deciding it liked a stray network:
“Turns out I was connected to ‘tsunami’ which is a common default name on Cisco wireless gear. Like the Cisco gear in our community center, which just a week or so before I was playing with. And that got me thinking.
“Many of you probably connect to wireless networks with common names- like Linksys, 2WIRExx, tsunami, or whatever. In other words, either default networks, or names (like those used at conferences and airports) that are in common use or easy to find. But when you remember those on your iPhone (or computer for that sake), it only remembers the network ID (SSID), not that actual network!
“Your iPhone doesn’t know the difference between ‘tsunami’ in your community center, ‘tsunami’ in an office building, and ‘tsunami’ running on some bad guy’s laptop to see what naive fools will connect to it. When you trust a network you’re just trusting a name anyone can use, not something really unique to that network. Your iPhone will then connect to any network using that name.”
Seeing as how I’m sitting here in the press room at Interop and can count 10 wireless networks, several of which invoke the “interop” brand without any indication of whether they’re “official” or just the preserve of some smirking ponytail, wireless security is on my mind. The air is abuzz back at my hotel, too, where there are two networks named for the hotel and where the one for guests isn’t really labeled as such. The instructions the hotel gives don’t anticipate that condition, which strikes me as a glaring gap in the documentation for any publicly available network in 2008.
Elsewhere at Interop
I had a lot of chats with security companies today. Smaller players are happy with yesterday’s announcement that Cisco is cooperating with the Interface for Metadata Access Point (IF-MAP) specification because they sense the opportunity to operate in a standards-driven market. If the rotting corpse of NAC-the-marketing-initiative will fertilize the ground and make way for NAC-the-thing-everyone-just-does-same-as-any-other-basic-function, then I guess I’m glad the corpse has spent the last year stinking up the place.
I also had a briefing with a company that specializes in identifying which users on a network are the most egregious bandwidth hogs/goof-offs. They were pretty clear about their core users: HR departments who want to put together a list of abuses quickly and easily, and supervisors who want to gather enough evidence of misuse/overuse of the Internet in whatever form so they can go complain to HR in the first place.
Their approach differed from other companies I’ve talked to about user behavior modification. Some take an instructive approach, offering admins the chance to pop up windows telling an abusive user his or her behavior is in violation of some policy or another. This company just throttles targeted services and sites to the point they’re unusable, and lets users draw their own conclusions. Whatever conclusions they haven’t drawn by seeing HR people swooping down from their mountain caves waving sheaves of bandwidth consumption reports, anyhow.
My gut reaction to employee monitoring software is almost invariably negative. I’ve been put in the position of using that kind of software, and I didn’t like it. But a moment’s reflection usually causes me to reconsider. I don’t care about the software that much. I’m just bothered by certain management mentalities. How many HR departments are using this sort of thing to counsel employees, and how many are using it as simple ammo?
My own experience with a manager eager to deploy surveillance software was a poor one: She wanted a cudgel, and she didn’t want anyone knowing the software was in use so her cudgel would be that much more shocking when it was applied. I don’t think much of that kind of gotcha management.
Posted by mhall at 7:00 PM | Add Comment
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