Execs from IBM, SAP and Roche weigh in on the use of the Apple iPhone versus Research In Motion’s BlackBerry for enterprise applications. The BlackBerry has maintained a slight edge in sales over the iPhone as of the third quarter of 2008, but competition between the two remains fierce.
– For the executives from IBM, health care
company Roche and others at SAP’s Feb. 4
press conference, the focus was on unveiling the new SAP
Business Suite 7 software but discussion did drift for a few moments to the
relative merits of the Apple
iPhone and Research
In Motion’s BlackBerry for ent…

Comcast has launched a new Wi-Fi service in New Jersey Transit stations thats free for its subscribers. Underway since Friday, the trial run that Comcast is offering is taking place at over 100 stations, and suggests the cable giant may be testing how to best compete against wireless-offering telecoms such as Verizon. eWEEK has place together a list of where the Comcast Wi-Fi service is being offered in New Jersey.
– Earlier today, we reported on Comcasts trial introduction of Wi-Fi for New Jersey Transit commuters. More than 100 rail
stations and parking lots are participating in the program, which is still in
the early stages; Comcast customers, after signing in with their usernames and
passwords, can surf…

Chip maker Qualcomm complains it spent $550 million for spectrum and hundreds of millions more to build a mobile television platform and followed the rules laid out by the Congress and the FCC. Qualcomm is ready to go into Channel 55 the day after the Feb. 17 deadline for broadcasters to switch from analog to digital broadcasting, and plans to offer 15 mobile TV stations on the same frequency that carries one analog station. Qualcomm needs the business, but Congress is moving to push the deadline to June 12.
– Most of the last year’s huge winners of the Federal
Communications Commission’s 700MHz auction are reluctant perhaps
understandably to push Congress to stay the course on a Feb. 17 deadline for
television stations to make the switch from analog to digital broadcasting.

Even though they paid bi…

Dell is plotting to enter the smartphone market as early as February with several different devices that look to compete with RIM’s BlackBerry and the Apple iPhone, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Dell smartphones will use either the Google Android operating system or Microsoft Windows Mobile, according to the Journal’s sources.
– LOS ANGELES (Reuters) Dell Inc is plotting a foray
into the cell phone market as early as next month, hoping to revitalize a
business walloped by crumbling PC sales but potentially pitting the firm
against Apple, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The world’s No. 2 maker of PCs, which…

The nation’s No. 2 carrier sees both wireline and wireless subscriptions tumble but posts a higher-than-expected growth in its FiOS television and high-speed Internet business.
– NEW YORK, Jan 27 (Reuters) – Verizon Communications reported a rise in quarterly net profit and
higher-than-expected growth in its FiOS television and
high-speed Internet business.
The No. 2 U.S. phone company said on Tuesday quarterly
profit rose to $1.2 billion, or 43 cents a share, from $1….

A new report finds that the global market for cell phones will shrink 9 percent in 2009, as the tough economy means consumers and businesses are spending less money on handset devices, phones and other types of electronics. The report follows gloomy outlooks from some of the worlds top handset makers, including Apple, Nokia, Samsung and LG.
– HELSINKI (Reuters) – The global mobile phone market will shrink 9
percent in 2009, its first decline since 2001 and with the first half
set to be especially grim as economic slowdown chokes consumer
spending, Strategy Analytics (SA) said.
quot;We expect the first half of 2009 to be very weak, a…

As mentioned, in the majority of cases an attacker does not have to do anything to get what he or she wants. The safe door is open and the goods are there to be taken. The Defcon 2002 wardriving contest showed that only 29.8 percent of 580 access points located by the contesters had WEP enabled. As much as 19.3 percent had default ESSID values, and (not surprisingly) 18.6 percent of learned access points did not use WEP and had default ESSIDs. If you reckon that something has changed since then, you are mistaken. If there were any changes, these were the changes for the worse, because the Defcon 2003 wardrive demonstrated that only approximately 27 percent of networks in Las Vegas are protected by WEP. Because one of the teams employed a lateral approach and went to wardrive in Los Angeles instead, this number also includes some statistics for that city.

The Defcon wardrive observations were independently confirmed by one of the authors wardriving and walking around Las Vegas on his own.

Are things any better on the other side of the Atlantic? Not really. We speculated that only around 30 percent of access points in the United Kingdom would have WEP enabled. To validate this for research purpose, one of the authors embarked for a London Sightseeing Tour in the well-known open-top red double-decker bus armed with a “debianized” laptop running Kismet, Cisco Aironet LMC350 card, and 12 dBi omnidirectional antenna. During the two-hour tour (exactly the time that laptop’s batteries lasted), 364 wireless networks were learned, of which 118 had WEP enabled; 76 had default or company name and address ESSIDs. Even worse, some of the networks learned had visible public IP addresses of wireless hosts that were pingable from the Internet side. If you are a wireless network administrator in central London and are reading this now, please take note. Of course, in the process of collecting this information, no traffic was logged to avoid any legal complications. The experiment was “pure” wardriving (or rather “warbusing”) at its best. Not surprisingly, warwalking in central London with a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA, D-Link DCF-650W CF 802.11b card (wonderful large antenna, never mind the blocked stylus slot), and Kismet demonstrated the same statistics. A similar level of 802.11 WLAN insecurity was revealed in Bristol, Birmingham, Plymouth, Canterbury, Swansea, and Cardiff.

Read the full tale

The widespread area of 802.11 network coverage zones is one of the major reasons for rising security concerns and interest: An attacker can be positioned where no one expects him or her to be and stay well away from the network’s physical premises. Another reason is the widespread use of 802.11 networks themselves: By 2006 the number of shipped 802.11-enabled hardware devices is estimated to exceed 40 million units (Figure 1-2), even as the prices on these units keep falling. After 802.11g products hit the market, the price for many 802.11b client cards dropped to the cost level of 100BaseT Ethernet client cards. Of course there is a fantastic speed disadvantage (5–7 Mbps on 802.11b vs. 100 Mbps on switched quick Ethernet), but not every network has high-speed requirements, and in many cases wireless deployment will be preferable. These cases include ancient houses in Europe protected as a part of the National Heritage. In such houses, drilling through obstacles to lay the cabling is prohibited by law. Another case is offices positioned on opposite sides of a busy street, highway, or office park. Finally, the last loop provider services via wireless are basically a replacement for the cable or xDSL link and 802.11b “pipe” is not likely to be a bottleneck in such cases, taking into account common xDSL or cable network bandwidth.

Figure 1.2. The growth of the 802.11 wireless market.

802.11 networks are everywhere, simple to find, and, as you will see in this book, often do not require any effort to associate with. Even if they are protected by WEP (which still remains the most common security countermeasure on 802.11 LANs), the vulnerabilities of WEP are very well publicized and known to practically anyone with a minimal interest in wireless networking. On the contrary, other wireless packet-switched networks are far from being that common and widespread, do not have well-known and “advertised” vulnerabilities, and often require obscure and expensive proprietary hardware to explore. At the same time, 802.11 crackers commonly run their own wireless LANs (WLANs) and use their equipment for both cracking and home and community networking.

Read the full tale

Rather than concentrating on the basics of general information security or wireless networking, this introductory chapter focuses on something grossly overlooked by many “armchair experts”: The state of wireless security in the real world. Before getting down to it, though, there is a need to tell why we are so keen on the security of 802.11 standards-based wireless networks and not other packet-switched radio communications. Figure 1-1 presents an overview of wireless networks in the modern world, with 802.11 networks taking the medium circle.

Figure 1.1. An overview of modern wireless networks.

As shown, we tend to use the term 802.11 wireless network rather than 802.11 LAN. This particular technology dissolves the margin between local and wide area connectivity: 802.11b point-to-point links can reach beyond 50 miles in distance, efficiently becoming wireless wide area network (WAN) connections when used as a last mile data delivery solution by wireless Internet service providers (ISPs) or long-range links between offices. Thus, we consider specifying the use of 802.11 technology to be necessary: Local area networks (LANs) and WANs always had and will have different security requirements and approaches.