Sliding Doors

[peterbirks]

Just as my next-door co-worker was muttering that he was accosted by an industry figure while strolling down the Champs Elysses at the weekend, ("What are the chances"? he said. "Higher than you think", I replied) so it has finally come to pass that I have two friends in Facebook who are friends with each other, but not through any link with me.

I expected a "triangular link" rather earlier than it occurred, actually. I suppose that I have four main circles of friends - Worcestershire, Board Games, Poker Players, and Media People. With the exception of the Worcestershire group, the other three are not desperately excluding of each other. And I suspect that one of the links (Media People) knows one of my other links (Board Games) through media, rather than through gaming.

++++++++

I opened an account with IG Index yesterday (simplicity itself compared with Cantor Index, although the web page doesn't function at work - sigh. Clearly there are firewalls in operation at work that mess things up even if they don't tell you that access is being blocked.

The IG trading page is very good indeed, although I think that it would be a good idea to offer a back-to-basics trading page as well, just so that I could get into and out of trades when at work.

A mobile broadband service looks more attractive by the day.

Anyhoo, I bit the bullet at 8.45pm tonight and went short the March Footsie at 4419. I will have to be in the office before trading opens Monday, so it struck me as "now or never".

++++++++++++

Speaking of broadband services, when I bought my Belkin there was no obvious way to turn off the wireless connection, and I have never worked out how to put in WEP or WPA or MacAddress blocks.

Well, that isn't true, I think that I HAVE worked it out, but the consequences of getting it wrong are pretty awful, so I've lived instead with the consequences of an insecure network -- other people can patch into it and steal my bandwidth.

However, it was becoming apparent that some little scumbag was taking the piss. So I looked a little deeper into the Belkin stuff.

First I discovered what "DHCP Client List" meant. Now, that's hardly "self-explanatory" is it? But, well, this is how computer people work. Never make anything obvious.

Clicking on this, I got:

192.168.2.2 Dell_Home 00:1a:a0:99:35:10
192.168.2.4 iPhone 00:23:12:90:d7:10
192.168.2.7 iPod
192.168.2.9 LASST140115
192.168.2.8 mercedes-PC 00:1f:e1:ce:36:d4
192.168.2.12 UKH105181 00:11:43:07:57:0a
192.168.2.3 unknown001cb3582827 00:1c:b3:58:28:27
192.168.2.5 unknown0021e939c5e6 00:21:e9:39:c5:e6
192.168.2.6 unknown001f5bbd2c9c 00:1f:5b:bd:2c:9c
192.168.2.10 unknown001b63002bf5 00:1b:63:00:2b:f5

That would mean nothing to any ordinary member of the human race, but I'm sad enough to understand most of it.


Well, the Dell Home one is mine, and the UKH105181 is my office machine. One of the above is my laptop, but I have no idea which. If I could be bothered, I'm sure that I could find out.

I don't own an ipod or an iphone, but I bet that when they say ipod or iphone, that isn't what they mean. This, remember, is computer geek world, where nothing is what it says it is.

And, of course, I understand the mac addresses, which the geeks put in hexadecimal because it's simpler for them that way and fuck ordinary humanity.

Like I say, I could probably put in Wireless Encryption without too much difficulty; but I'm petrified of locking myself out.

This, for example, is what you can find on the Belkin pages:

Firewall > WAN Ping Blocking
ADVANCED FEATURE! You can configure the Router not to respond to an ICMP Ping (ping to the WAN port). This offers a heightened level of security.

Oooh, excellent.

Firewall > Client IP Filters
>> Access Control
Access Control allows users to define the traffic type permitted or not-permitted to WAN port service. This page includes IP address filtering and MAC address filtering.

Good. Good.

Firewall > Virtual Servers
This function will allow you to route external (Internet) calls for services such as a web server (port 80), FTP server (Port 21), or other applications through your Router to your internal network

Right.

And, finally, the important bit:
Wireless > Security
You can configure wireless security/encryption settings here. Security should be enabled to assure maximum wireless security. WPA (Wireless Protected Access) provides dynamic key changes and constitutes the best security solution. In wireless environment, where not all devices support WPA, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) should be used.

Luckily, it's now possible to disable the wireless functionality altogether from the 192.168.2.1 page, which is what I have done. Or, at least, I think that's what I have done. I haven't fired up the laptop to find out, because, well, I hardly ever use it these days.

So, whoever was leeching off my bandwidth to download kiddie porn or (more likely) some movie in High Definition, they will have discovered last night that the door was solidly closed.

I Hope.

One day a geek will be born who can communicate in plain English in a fashion that non-geeks can understand (and, hell, I'm leaning towards geekiness myself -- what must it be like for those whom hexadecimal is meaningless drivel?). But, hell, I'm not holding my breath.

_________________

Comments

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Yep - it doesn't take long for some of the more bizarre triangles (and other shapes) to occur. My groups comprise of (in order of arrival); clients, family (and friends of Nix), university friends, boardgames. The clients area is a whole sub-set in itself which didn't take long to connect itself between lighting engineers in Bristol and baroque cellists in Edinburgh.

I have one bit of head-scratching with you actually since one of your friends - an old time media poker-ish person is a friend of someone from my client box - a Zimbabwean-born pianist who you definitely won't know. Or will you?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I assume that you are referring to Tony Holden, with whom I played poker some 30 years ago. So, no, I wouldn't know the Zimbabwean pianist. But Tony has musical connections -- his first wife is a well-known librettist and translator of librettos, while Tony was opera critic at The Observer for a while.

PJ

Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

I'm at a loss to see what you're complaining about (although your reference to "192.168.2.1" as a "page" suggests a degree of child-like incomprehension).

This isn't the worst piece of Chinglish I've seen; not by a long way. It even gives you options, for god's sake. The only faintly geek-like thing -- ie something that only makes sense if you understand the TCP/IP protocol stack and have dabbled in Internet security, like, say, sadly me -- is the stupid suggestion to turn off ICMP and ping access. Ignore.

I'm not sure what you expect from complicated bits of networking equipment, but the day when instructions are provided in some sort of Hemingway English ("Kill the fish! Puto de mielo! The fresh morning air on the savannah smells good; the Old One is in my sights. By the way, Mrs Alice Kipplebone down the road is stealing your bandwidth, and you should never smoke a kipper without filtering it first"), or else perhaps pidgin ("Master WEP, he say, move-move address you-put many many many many many plus one finger-word, then all-people you-person hidey-hidey key mek") will not happen in our lifetimes.

I'm also curious to know how one as versed in communication theory as yourself might improve on the current practice of expressing a series of hexadecimal numbers -- which is what a MAC address is -- as a series of hexadecimal numbers. I imagine it might help to replace those nasty two-digit identifiers with their equivalent in a suitably large alphabet, such as Kanji (bit of a waste of 1855 characters, though).

Look, plumbing is difficult (as I presently know, to my cost). The internal combustion engine is difficult. Absolutely any field whatsoever that has the remotest degree of complexity, such as circumcising a lobster for example, is likely to generate its own terminology. Fuck, poker is difficult.

I don't blame the geeks; I blame the marketing people. All this stuff about it being a "personal" computer is bollocks. It should be a "Beware! Here be monsters!" computer.

To your particular problem, however. As a fully-qualified Internet Security Expert (ie I wrote a fifty line script in Perl once), I wish to point out the following salient points:

(1) You are in full physical control of your Belkin router. This is the crucial aspect to security. If you fuck up the settings, the worst that can happen is that you'll need to reset the damn thing and start again. What happens inside the box, stays inside the box.
(2) You are at liberty to look up the more recherche aspects of WPA on the Net, in the intervals between your little friend next door downloading upskirt hi-def movies onto his iPhone. I wouldn't bother. This level of security is essentially best left to corporate paranoids.
(3) Don't be so greedy. Charity is a virtue. So are Faith and Hope, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
(4) The lines you quote did actually suggest a perfectly viable, and indeed safe, approach to your security issue: namely, IP Address or MAC filtering. IP Addressing is pretty useless, since you're using DHCP rather than fixed addresses (which is how the freeloader got access in the first place). Since you now know the MAC addresses of all relevant machines, why don't you just limit access to those MAC addresses?

It's not rocket science. Like so many seemingly intractable technical issues, the key is to stop whining and to start thinking.

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

"your reference to "192.168.2.1" as a "page" suggests a degree of child-like incomprehension)."

I rest my case.

PJ

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

And in reply to your final question ("why don't you just limit access to those MAC addresses?): The guy who set this up in the first place tried the MacAddress route, ballsed it up (managing to lockl himself out of the router) and had to phone Belkin. Since IT was his job, I don't think that my fears are completely irrational.

PJ

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

"Since IT was his job ..."

I rest my case.

A touching naivete, there, young man, but there's still time to bash it out of you.

"Since Wealth Creation was Madoff's job..."

"Since avoiding Boom and Bust was Brown's job..."

"Since Miracle Cellulite-U-Lose Solutions was Mrs Alice Kipplebone's job..."

"Since building Weapons of Mass Destruction was Saddam's job..."

caveat emptor.

No fears are completely irrational. They are merely sub-pineal.

And no, I don't have a clue how to whitelist MAC addresses on a Belkin router either, despite that I own one. My point was merely that your response to one particular technical problem ("Sod the Geeks!") was largely ad hominem, and could equally well have been applied to almost any other area I might think up without resort to name-calling.

If you can find a moil who's willing to circumcise a lobster, let me know. There's a lot of calling for that sort of thing up here in Birmingham. Not so much for configuring routers, however; we're not so primitive up here.

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, fuck me, an ad hominem argument in a late-night blog posting. You'll be hearing ad hominem arguments in pubs next. What next in blogworld? Perhaps if you look harder you might find sophistry and non sequiturs.

As for your blatant prejudice against ad hominem arguments -- many of which come to the correct conclusion (albeit, you would claim, by mistake). I have just two words for you. Bayes' Theorem.

Hah, now that's opened up a a whole new can of worms in what Matt would call "chalk and cheese".

PJ

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, I've mislaid my trusty guide to critical thinking, because I lent it to a freak down the pub who was interested in the chapter on spontaneous combustion -- so I'm just going to have to wing it. I tried googling the term, and merely came up with a plethora of bill posters for junior college courses ... an old GH cover on the BBC ("Moron Shall Speak Unto Moron") springs to mind. The Internet is dying. Your router is merely collateral damage.

I did actually manage, some years back, to introduce the phrase "post hoc ergo propter hoc" into a pub conversation, at an appropriate moment. I was smug. Responses were, predictably, ad hominem.

For ad hominem in general, I refer readers to this catechism. (http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html)

I may be prejudiced against the use of ad hominem arguments. My prejudice may even be blatant (as opposed to "closeted," I presume). It would clearly be ann incorrect deduction to infer that I deny the possible accuracy of a conclusion based upon such an argument, merely because the intervening logical steps are potentially flawed.

To assert otherwise would be to fall into the same trap as people (princes, paupers, and piss-pots) who claim that "the trouble with orthodox medicine is that it ignores the positive results of alternative medicine." As somebody (I forget who) pointed out, this is gibberish. If an alternative medicine works, it is no longer alternative medicine. It is orthodox medicine. Similarly with correct conclusions derived through logically dodgy arguments.

If I can read back through my alcoholic haze of last night, btw, I believe that your only real ad hominem attack was on the supposed geek perfidy of representing hexadecimal numbers as hexadecimal numbers ... not, I would have thought, a position that would stand up to the most casual of inspections, let alone a Bayesian one. You'll be resorting to the Wisdom of Crowds next -- "Sixteen fingers? The man's a freak! Burn him!"

I sense that the can of worms to which you refer here might be something to do with "Bayesian Modelling in Hierarchical Belief Networks," which, if I understand it correctly, is a (vaguely set-based) production series from Hypothesis, to Ambiguous Interpretation, to Sense Data. I'm guessing here, but you are possibly assigning my comment re "ad hominem" to the Ambiguous Interpretation point of this progression.

That it might be. In the words of a very wise man, however, "Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and again."

Leaving temporary philosophical fads to one side, I note that both chalk and cheese (at least Parmesan) share the same billing on the Moh's scale. I wonder what your comment might mean?

Re: Wind, Fury, and Non-Signifers

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, and I have to be fair here, I actually meant to title that screed "Sound, Fury, and Non-Signifers."

Typos and brain-farts can happen to the best of us, along with unbalanced parentheses in quotes.

I shall now revert to my hitherto unexamined penchant for JB-style comments, which seem more appropriate to the age:

"Gold is Good, my preciousss ... yass ... what has it got in its caveses?"

... although I think James' proposed financial dispositions for next year sound extremely dicey. Gold looks awful to the risk averse, what with currencies bouncing up and down like Peter Andre on Jordan, and oil and mining don't look much better in the medium term.

BTW, there's about a coupla hunnert lines further down, should your case get restless. The chef particularly recommends the kosher joke on about line 55.