Geek uses packet sniffer to catch his girlfriend cheating

More details here:

http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000638.html

I am sorry to hear of your problems with your girlfriend. I have been there and know a little of what it is like. Unfortunately for men there is less support then women have from their friends.

With my notebook I used AirSnare and Ethereal (in XP) to see if neighbors, etc., are bootlegging my WiFi (not to spy on my family). I had some suspicious activity so I now use WEP to stop it. The software combination worked quite well. I could monitor all the WiFi traffic. The router came with Windows software to log all traffic leaving the router if I wanted to do that.

I also log into my wireless router and check to see who is using it. I use a desktop running SuSE Linux and Firefox via Ethernet cable. I am nearly weaned from Windows. Unfortunately I cannot do my taxes with TurboTax yet in Linux.

Now that my SuSE 10.0 Linux on a HP notebook can use WiFi and WEP I now have all the family members using WEP (they use XP). FYI, a Linksys WPC11 ver 4 wireless adapter works well with this flavor of Linux right out of the box. I mention this as I tried numerous wireless cards until I found one that worked without a lot of technical skills that I don't have.

I now have many more neighbors due to housing construction behind my house. Also my equipment is on the second floor of a wood house. I discovered that the new wireless cards and routers can have a range of more than 100 meters so there are many houses within that radius. My estimate is at least 25 houses within that circle. I feel that router to router is possible so that radius could at least double. All the more reason to monitor and encrypt.

My step-daughter is typical pain in the rear and knows it all. When her mother mentioned that she was bootlegging a neighbor's WiFi at the apartment where she lives while at college I pointed out just how insecure her email letters to her boy friends were. Both her mother and she tried to jump on me for eavesdropping on her conversations at home (as if I really care--I never used the logging feature of the router).
The point of this is to show that WiFi that does not use encryption at least to the router is exposed to everyone using the above mentioned software. At the router the data is loggable.

So good luck in recovering from this breakup with your girl friend. Sometimes people just grow apart through nobody's fault.

So please be aware of the insecurity of WiFi. If I can monitor my system's activity then almost anyone can. I wonder if I should have never said a thing to my smart-ass step-daughter? Nah, 'cause her mother (and I) would have to pay her fines and lawyers' fees if she is caught stealing WiFi access.

Where will America's future scientists get their chemistry sets if chemistry sets are banned?

Don't think it cannot happen? Think again. I remember quite well my first and only chemistry set at about the age of 13. When I ran out of candles as a heat source I scraped pine resin and used that. Stinky, smoky and my Dad finally put a stop to that.

The amount of the chemicals listed that a chemistry set would contain is insignificant. But what about our schools' ability to teach chemistry (and physics)? At College of the Siskiyous in 1967, Mr. Kinkade, the Teacher, required the students to identify various metallic samples. I remember that mine was aluminum and I had a heck of a time getting it to react to the acid.

This country MUST encourage more people to enter the sciences. For many of the below listed materials I can figure out substitutes and alternative methods of manufacturing them using nothing more than an electric sander and lots of time grinding into fine power the aluminum cylinder head from a car or the magnesium parts from a motorcycle.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/legalaction.htm

The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers.
In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us - this action must be stopped now.
Specifically, the CPSC is focusing on certain chemicals and metals at this time. The current CPSC injunction would require:

"Not sell, give away or otherwise distribute any of the following Metals for which the particle size is finer than 100 mesh (or particles less than 150 microns in size) to any recipient who does not possess a valid
manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF:"

Aluminum and Aluminum alloys
Magnalium metal
Magnesium metal
Magnesium/Aluminum alloys
Titanium and Titanium alloys
Zinc metal
Zirconium metal

"Not sell, give away or otherwise distribute any of the following chemicals to any recipient who does not possess a valid manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF:"

Antimony and antimony compounds
Benzoate compounds
Nitrate compounds
Permanganate compounds
Chlorate compounds
Perchlorate compounds
Salicylate compounds
Sulfur

Censorship is alive and well at SecureComputing

and BoingBoing has ways of evading their censorship:

http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html
Some information, such as child porn or how to build a nuke, should be restricted or blocked. Sites like BoingBoing have neither so should not be censored. I discovered these links from http://www.ioerror.us/2006/03/01/this-is-secure-computing/ or http://www.ioerror.us/ .

I will post more as I find them. I grew up reading anything I wanted. I had my first library card when I was eight years old in the little town of Tennant, California! My Mother was the Librarian and she did not believe in censorship. She permitted meto read anything I wanted. Later librarians were just as open as she was. I cut my eye teeth on robert [Anson] Heinlein. I remember his middle name very well because librarians have a habit of adding his middle name in pencil to the title page. I have never understood why they did that. In my opinion his masterpieces include "Time Enough For Love" and "
Stranger In A Strange Land." The latter gave us the term 'grok'. I recommend these to everyone although many religions would find fault with them.

The following is from BoingBoing's web site listed above:

• A group called Peacefire created proxy software called Circumventor to bypass censorware. Install this software on your home computer and allow others to use your proxy to access the web, or use your proxy from work or school to access any web site. (Thanks, Sean!)

• Bennett Haselton of Peacefire, who developed Circumventor, says:

  "For 90% of users in the USA affected by SmartFilter, there is no reason to use anything but Circumventor. The reasons are:

  1) It's simple to set up. Just run three simple point-and-click installers. We even have a wizard that comes up automatically to help you set up port forwarding on your router if you've never done it before.
  2) You are not required to install anything on the "censored" computer, you just bring a URL in with you to work.
  3) It works even if the censored network blocks direct connections to IP addresses outside the network (which would break some of the other solutions recommended in this guide).

  "If you're in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or some other country censored by SmartFilter, then your best choices are (a) TOR, or (b) use a Circumventor if you can get someone in a "free country" to set one up for you. (The reason Circumventor works for 90% of workplace-filtered users in the U.S. is that they can almost always set it up on their home computer and take the URL in with them. But not everybody in a censored *country* has someone outside who can help them.)

  "Circumventor is the *only* method (as far as I know) that will work reliably on computers where people are blocked from installing their own software (or even changing proxy settings) -- because after you install it on your home computer, all it gives you is a URL, and you can take that URL in with you to work and use it whenever you want. Many people in workplaces and libraries are blocked from installing software on their computers. Or even if they could, it would be a definite 'smoking gun' if anyone noticed that the software had been installed; whereas our software leaves fewer traces. (There is a 'smoking gun' in the form of a URL in the URL history, but that's much less likely to be noticed than a TOR icon on your desktop!)"

• Rich says, "This cgi-bin script is the guts inside Peacefire's Circumventor - a Perl CGI script that proxys for you. While Circumventor is a full script to get it working under Win2k/XP, the cgiproxy script alone lets you get it going on Linux and (presumeably) Mac OSX. And the best part - the setup is dirt simple - if you're already running a web server, pretty much just drop it in your cgi-bin directory.