Is Your Wireless Network Dangerous?

The debate over the potential for our wireless toys to cause health problems in humans has raged since the first cell phones came on the scene a couple of decades ago. Personally I've wondered how it can be healthy to walk around with a source of electro-magnetic radiation clipped to my belt. But I worked in the cellular industry for several tears and the powers that be always siad there was no evidence that cellular emissions posed a health risk (notice the didn't come out and say it was safe, either). But then I'd sit down in front of my computer and my cell phone would start making some goofy noises come out of my speakers. Hmmm.

Now people are starting to ask the same questions about Wi-Fi. I caught this article in an e-newsletter today. It's not out-and-out proof that your wireless Internet will kill you, but it got me thinking. Again.

Look at all the sources of radiation that have appeared and proliferated in the last hundred years or so: AM/FM radio (and then a whole spectrum of radio from short wave to cellular and Wi-Fi), television, microwave and more. Maybe all this stuff just passes harmlessly through our bodies. But then again, when they give you a lead vest and hide behind a wall to X-Ray your teeth, you've got to wonder.

Find out more about different sources of radiation and what the mean to you here.

Loss of Focus

At Byte Slaves we get annoyed by the little problems that bother other computer users, too. Lately for me it's been with my new Toshiba Satellite laptop running Vista Home Premium. It seems it's always losing its focus.

In the computer world, focus means the window in which the cursor is active. Typically that's the one you're working in. But often times the focus will change when an urgent message pops uo. Or, as I'm finding, when a not-so-urgent message pops up. For me it happens mostly when I'm in email. I've got a program that syncs my Outlook calendar with my Google calendar. Every time it runs succesfully it changes the focus.

I'm a touch typist, so I'm not always looking at the screen. I type pretty quickly, too. So when the focus shifts I'm suddenly typing NOTHING. And I hear "ding ding ding" every time I hit a key. That really chaps my hide. Especially when I'm in a hurry.

The bottom line is that I don't care if a program has run successfully. Whether it's my sync program, my email program or my anti virus. These are NOT urgent messages. They certainly should not pop to the front of whatever I'm doing and make me click OK

If you have programs that are doing this, please take a moment to visit the company's support or customer service page and let them know you don't appreciate these little messages. If they get enough feedback maybe they'll make a change.

Outrageous Spyware Story

I copied the following from the Internet Patrol Web site. Seems the folks at Lexmark really want to know about your printing habits. I did a little research and it seems a lot of people have discovered this little bugger. One of our techs ran into an issue with a customer using this printer. Seems he couldn't print at all. Turns out that the customer had a dialup connection. When he wasn't connected to the Internet the printer couldn't "phone home" - no contact with Lexmark's server and the printer won't print. My tech verified this with Lexmark support.

Do you have a Lexmark printer? If so, you could also have Lexmark’s Lx_CATS spyware — which Lexmark euphemistically calls “tracking software” for “reporting printer and cartridge use back to the company for survey purposes” — living on your computer, without your knowledge.

A user calling himself “Commander” has posted to the printer-focused Usenet group, comp.periphs.printers, that:

“Just the other day I purchased a new Lexmark X5250 All-in-one printer. I installed it as per the instructions and monitored the install with Norton as I do with all new software.

On reviewing the install log I noticed a program called Lx_CATS had been placed in the c:program files directory. I investigated and found a data log and an initialisation file called Lx_CATS.ini. Further investigation of this file showed that Lexmark had, without my permission, loaded a Trojan backdoor on to my computer. Furthermore, it is embedded into the system registry, so average users would likely never know it was there and active.”

Commander noticed that the spyware was programmed to surreptitiously report back to a URL, www.lxkcc1.com, every thirty days. lxkcc1.com is registered to Lexmark International, Inc..

When Commander called Lexmark to demand an explanation, the company first denied that they had installed any spyware at all. Ultimately the person with whom he spoke conceded that Lexmark installs “tracking software” on their users’ computers “to report back on printer and cartridge use for survey purposes.” While the Lexmark representative avowed that they did not transmit any personal information, they also admitted that the program does transmit the printer’s serial number, which of course is registered to the user. No personal information my foot!

Rumours of the installation of spyware along with their printer software have swirled around Lexmark for several years, and posts to Usenet complaining of Lexmark spyware date from as early as 2001. Some users complain of their computer trying to connect to the Internet every time they print a document; others worry that the program is reporting not only their cartridge usage, but whether they are using non-Lexmark cartridges, or even refilling their own cartridges, thus possibly setting the stage for a denial of warranty service.

According to “Commander”, the offending files include a program file called lx_CATS, and a related .ini file, lx_CATS.ini, as well as 2 DLL files in the c:program fileslexmark500 folder.

In order to remove Lexmark’s spyware from your system, delete the file (probably in your c:program directory) called “lx_cats.exe”, and also search for and remove a file called “lx_cats.ini” (and, for that matter, any other file including the term “lx_cats”).

My New Favorite Gadget

I've been a fan of Star Trek for a while as you may have guessed by other posts. I can't help but compare so many ordinary things today to what seemed so whizz-bang just a few years ago. Think about it: cell phone "communicator" (I love it when William Shatner opens his cell phone on Boston Legal - it makes the communicator sound), doors that open when you walk up to them and voice activated cars - it's all coming so quickly.

Now the PADD has come to life. This is the coolest the coolest gadgetto date, IMHO. It is the iPhone's cousin the iPod Touch. It's about 8mm thick and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. I fell in love with it when I got it just before Christmas. It's got WiFi capability, an Internet browser that lets you zoom in on Web sites so they can easily be read on it's crystal-clear 3.5" screen. It's got a calendar and address book that you can sync with your PC or Mac. Not only that, it plays music and videos! With the WiFi feature you can even buy tunes straight from your iPod!

But wiat! There's more! Just this month Apple "unlocked" the iPod so you can now add email, real-time stock quotes, Google maps, weather and more. It is now truly as cool as it gets. I can do pretty much anything I would normally do on a laptop without ahaving to worry about where I can plug it in or waiting for it to boot. It fits in my shirt pocket (I got it a rubber case so it doesn't slip out of said pocket), it has all my favorite music and videos on it as well as a hundred or so photos. Way cool.

I've been a PDA user since the first Palm Pilot came out, and I've jumped to the next coolest as fast as it came out. Well, that and the amount of money in my wallet. I've had Palm-powered devices and Windows Mobile devices, but this really takes the prize. It's sleek, it's pretty, it is easy to use. I encourage you to check it out.

People are asking why I didn't just get an iPhone. Well, I've heard the battery life isn't too hot for one thing. My iPod will play music all day and still let me surf the Web. I also happen to like my current wireless carrier (and I've still got a contract). But it does make my once-cool cell phone look a litte clunky.

What's your favorite gadget?

Do You See What I See?

I heard that famous Christmas carol in a Chinese restaurant the other day. At the same time I saw a kid across aisle from me busily pecking away at his cell phone. Was he sending a text message to a friend or was he playing a game? I had no way of knowing. But it got me thinking. What does that kid think of me over here hacking away on my laptop? What I do know is that even though we were looking at the same things - a computer and a cell phone - we were seeing different things. I saw a cool and powerful computer in front of me and a kid playing with an overly complex data device. I bet the kid was wondering about the old guy using the clunky old computer (and telling all his friends about it via IM).

It seems that age really does temper our view of technology. For me, texting is a novelty that I've never mastered. Pushing the "7" button on my phone four times to enter the letter "S" is just counter-intuitive. Yeah, I know there are programs that guess what I'm trying to enter and I can select from a list of words. Now I'm trying to read and type at the same time. Nope, not going to happen. I went out and got a phone that has a tiny keypad on it so I can text like everyone else. Now I just have to learn to read what people are sending me.

I think about the discussions I had with my Dad back in the '90s. Desktop computers were starting to show up in his office and he wasn't happy about it. He told me he didn't know a thing about programming and wasn't planning to learn. My assurances that he wouldn't have to program a thing fell on deaf ears. He ended up retiring early just so he wouldn't have to make the change.

A couple of years later my Mom bought a "home computer" and this really irked my father. Today we'd laugh at the 64MB of RAM and archaic processor. But back then it was pretty cool. My brother and I started creating programs in BASIC and my mother started printing out the Help files. Mom became a big fan of email. My wife and I always laughed when Mom would call and ask us if we'd gotten the email she sent ten minutes before.

Flash forward to the present day. My cell phone has more horsepower than my Mom's PC. Now I'm calling my employees wondering why they haven't responded to an email I sent a half hour ago. They get back at me by sending text messages to my phone. Folks half my age are laughing at me when they see my feeble attempts to decipher and respond to these text messages.

What's in store for the kids that are laughing at me? My generation was (and some of us still are) impressed with the hardware and the amazing advances it has made in our lifetime. Younger adults expect the hardware to be cool and fast. They're more fascinated with the content than the device used to access it. We've gone from dial up to light-speed fiber optics right up to our door in less than ten years. We've gone from choppy music videos on the new-fangled world wide web to posting and watching our own videos on YouTube - all in less than 20 years. There are now more than 100 million Web sites on the Internet, and more actual Web pages than there are people on earth.

What will the Internet look like in another decade? What form will the information take and how will we access it? I can pretty much guarantee that whatever your guess is, it's going to be wrong. I'm not even going to try to predict the future. I'm just going to focus on learning to speak "text."

I Am Borg?

For those of you who aren't Start Trek fans, the Borg are an alien race that is part human, part machine. They live in a collective and are incapable of independent thought.

That being said, I'm starting to worry that we are on our way to becoming Borg. The latest tell-tale is the Bluetooth headsets so many of us are wearing. I bought mine because a) my phone is a bit clunky to hold to my ear, and b) I use my phone in the car a lot.

At first I thought it was cool, but the more I see people walking around seemingly talking to themselves I start to worry. These things are maybe not so cool. Especially to the uninitiated. Not only do I hate it when people come up and talk to me when I'm on the phone while using a Bluetooth headset, I hate it when I have to point to my ear and silently mouth "I'm on the phone." Some people still don't get it and continue to chatter away at you, then give you a funny look when you say something totally out of context for the discussion they think you're having with them.

So who's the rude one? The person talking on an invisible phone or the person trying to talk to the person on an invisible phone? I've got to admit it's most probably the person on the invisible phone. And that person is often me. But I always try to let anyone I'm with know I'm taking (or making) a call, just as I would if I were using a regular phone. If the person I'm with still feels the urge to carry on a conversation, I think the shoe's on the other foot.

Whichever side of the fence you're on, more and more people are plugging these devices into their ears. They're light, and some are even stylish (in a geeky sort of way). Mine's so light I sometimes forget to take it off sometimes, which really tickles my wife. Everywhere you go you see people having conversations with the air. And I think the ease of answering calls with these nifty little ear buds makes people forget just where they are and who's around them. In other words, people carrying on conversations about things you don't know or don't care about while you're trying to carry on with your business. Rude?

You've got to admit there's a lot of potential for humor in these situations. I'm surprised there hasn't been more attention given this phenomenon by comics. But it really isn't all that funny to me. I try to turn mine off and put in my pocket or at least take it off my ear when I'm in meetings or in a situation where I wouldn't normally answer a call. Is that proper?

Share your thoughts on Bluetooth etiquette or your funny story about a conversation or situation you've run into.

Really Fast Internet

I remember when I went from dial-up to DSL. I was simply amazed. Then I upgraded from DSL to cable. Once again I was amazed. Now I get to play with customer networks connected to fiber and T-1. Very cool stuff. Now it's all about streaming media and downloading songs. I can download a song in seconds and an entire album in minutes. Who could need more speed? I had gone from Kbps (thousands of bits per second) to Mbps (millions of bits per second).

Well, I read an article in the paper a couple of weeks ago about Internet2. It's being developed by academics for academics (and government and big businesses). At least for now. It has a theoretical limit of 10 Gbps (that's 10 billion bits per second). You could download a full-length movie in about 30 seconds. This Internet 2 parallels the existing Internet and was largely completed this past August.

But wait, there's more. There is now a 100 Gbps backbone. Downloading The Matrix just went from a butt-dragging 30 seconds to about three seconds. It's all done with fiber optics. Multiple strands using multiple colors allowing much more data to be sent simultaneously over the same cable.

With more and more content on the Internet, more applications becoming Internet-based, the need for consumer bandwidth is going to keep growing. With TVoIP (high-quality streaming video over the Internet) just over the horizon, I don't think it will be too long before average folks like you and me are going to start looking back at Mega bit speeds as quaint. Where do you see the Internet going as the speeds increase expopnentially?