Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

I can’t think of a better way to describe it than a “Ghost SSID.”

I am sitting in a conference center in Pittsburgh, and when I open my laptop, I see what appear to be several wireless networks available for connection. Free Public WIFI, hpsetup, and SUNY Geneseo. The guy sitting next to me tried to connect to each of these, but received limited — local access only. It’s not a real wireless access point — it’s an ad-hoc connection with a laptop, masquerading as Free Public WIFI. What’s up with that? Is that a virus?

Well, a little searching on Yahoo! brought the answer. It seems that under some conditions when Windows XP connects to a network, it remembers the SSID of that network and broadcasts it as an ad-hoc network. So someone in this conference center has recently connected to the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo wireless network. That laptop is broadcasting the SSID, SUNY Geneseo, as an ad-hoc network. It’s not a real network — it’s a ghost of a network past.

Is there a problem connecting to this? Maybe. I guess it might give the other PC user access to your shared files, depending on your system settings. More likely, it will simply reproduce itself on your system and you’ll begin broadcasting the SSID.

So I guess while it’s not a virus, it is indeed viral.

Lots of sites have CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” those warped letters and numbers you have to enter to register at some web sites or post comments on blogs. A computerworld article describes how spammers have programs that can now defeate them. It only succeeds 8%-13% of the time. But when you have a bunch of computers trying that is good enough. So spam coming from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google mail accounts is climbing.

But a company has come up with a Image based version. They alter the color and contrast on different sections of pictures. Then make the user pick a caption for a picture that has been overlaid with lines. Currently they believe only humans will be able to succeed at both tasks.

Recently I downloaded Yahoo! Autosync version 1.0.4.9 so I could put my Outlook calendar on Yahoo! and share it with the secretary at the office. It worked great at first — but then stopped performing as advertised — saying it was timing out when trying to communicate with the server.

Then when I would load my calendar at “http://calendar.yahoo.com” it would give me an error. Error 999.

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