Going Wireless… Going Nuts

Wireless is invading our homes these days – HDTV’s, Blue-Ray DVDs, Nintendo DSI’s, SLR cameras are slowly getting into the wireless bandwagon as well. Obviously there is a purpose for these devices going wireless and we can spend the whole day talking about the subject but what I’d like to talk about in this post is what people do nowadays – buying that cheap wireless router from the local store or through the internet mail order and attaching the unit to their cable or DSL allowing their PC’s and laptops to browse the net in a wireless fashion. The mobility feature of wireless is its main selling point and it is really great when you have more than one PC or laptop at home – it gets rid of the cabling hassle. Some people don’t understand however that if they turn on their wireless router in a plug and play fashion with its default configuration, they would be offering a public service – free internet access to their neighbors 🙂

For years now, I always see a neighbor’s UNSECURED wireless network ( using the default name of the router manufacturer) when I do “view available wireless networks” from my laptop. I was kidding my wife that maybe we should cancel our internet service because it looks like our neighbor doesn’t plan to get educated any time soon 🙂 Well, not quite. For all I know he providing free internet access on purpose and spoofing on our privacy 😉 So I told my wife never to do internet banking or online purchase on our neighbor’s wireless network and always do it on ours which is secure. The rule of thumb when activating your wireless router is to install the highest level of encryption between the router and your devices. This ensures that only your devices can authenticate to your router. You can also add further security by MAC filtering and that means allowing only the MAC addresses of your wireless devices to connect. You can also turn off the broadcasting of our SSID or your network name to the airwaves so that no one sees your network. Only your devices that know your network name can connect. With these three options which are not difficult to configure, your network will be fairly secure but of course, never impregnable to the willing hacker. 😯

Last week, I took my laptop to the office for some software upgrade. I felt like browsing the net out of our corporate network so I searched for an unsecured wireless access point in the neighborhood I can ride on and  this iswhat I found. Strange that someone would deliberately advertise his wireless access point as FREE . I can understand that he’s pretty pissed with the wireless network provider judging from his language 🙂 but man, would you ever trust the dude’s network? 😉

KRIS PROTECTING HER TERRITORY AND GOING NUTS

In these times of recession, the cruise business had suffered a setback hence cruise prices have dropped but this didn’t stop a cruise line from banning a cougar club – a bunch of older women looking for younger men to date – from boarding its ships. What might be the relevance of this news ? Perhaps not much but read on anyways 🙂

Over breakfast last Sat. morning, the wifey updated me of the recent controversy of Kris Aquino confronting a single woman who reportedly sought advice on her troubled love life from Kris’ hubby, basketball star James Yap. The woman is an acquaintance and lives a few blocks in the same affluent neighborhood where the Yaps live. Kris was reportedly incensed on overhearing her hubby James, some 10 years her junior, of acting like a counselor, giving advice to an unattached, younger, single woman over the phone so she wanted to confront the girl to ask her to consult someone else and not a married man like her husband. I guess friendship does have bounds and conditions eh? 😯 It looked like James was intimidated with his wife’s growls so he told the girl to apologize to his wife Kris, perhaps to appease her wife and prevent her from launching an air strike. Here’s where the issue became more convoluted – when the girl told relatives and the latter muddied up the whole story by implicating politics, Cory and Nonoy’s candidacy. 😡 Now, let me skip the frigging politics part and get on with the story. The girl’s relatives arranged the confrontation but the girl reportedly acted peeved, feeling that she had no reason to apologize nor to be chastised because she did nothing wrong. Does she have a point ?

Here’s where I am really getting at and I couldn’t care less about the personalities and the gossip itself. I am questioning the propriety of the confrontation. Seriously now, does a person have the right to confront someone because she harbors thoughts that may have “intent of malice” ? I can understand if the personalities involved are children or minors who have a flimsy grasp of the nature of judiciousness but… grown up adults ?? With children, we sometimes “control” the environment because of the frailty of their decision making ability, but policing adults in this fashion is paranoia to the max in my opinion. Bottom line it is the philandering husband who is ultimately accountable to the wife , not the one he goes out with. The civility of behavior in the confrontation isn’t the point. The malicious assumption behind such confrontation is the real point. Let us be aware that people take suspicion of malice as an outright accusation because they feel their character is being second-guessed and you can’t blame them if they get offended. Kris sure behaved like she was a cougar protecting a captured prey from being taken away from her. 😯

THE PROFESSIONAL AMATEUR

If the number of wannabees and glory hogs showing their musical talent on YouTube is in the millions, there are bound to be gems as well, those who can really sing or play and stumbling on a few of them is like finding a planet similar to earth in our universe 🙂 Well, here’s one dude who did justice to a James Taylor classic. The last time I watched a JT concert I was pretty disappointed with the spin JT did on a classic song that demands to be listened to as it was cut on record. I keep a bookmark on these “professional amateurs” as soon as I spot them and will regularly include them in my posts 🙂
(Note : the song is only 2 mins – not 6 )