Pet Peeve - Hotels with poor wireless connectivity

Most of the upscale resorts and hotels are offering internet access. In many cases, the internet access is wireless.

The problem is that the wireless coverage is often spotty at best. We recently stayed at a four star resort. Supposedly they had coverage in the rooms. The reality was that the signal stregnth was very low and the connectivity would drop every 5 minutes or so. This made it next to useless.

I also noticed that there were a lot of people in the lobby area with their laptops. They all said that the connectivity in their rooms was poor so they were bringing their laptops to the lobby.

This particular resort is less than 5 years old. The rooms are quite expensive going for about 500+ per night during the off season. My guess is that the resort planners simply don't pay enough attention to providing wireless with effective coverage. They most likely leave the design to someone without the degree of experience required.

A year or so back, wireless access was somewhat of a luxury. However, in today's world, people are increasingly dependant on being connected.

My suggestions to hotel owners are

• Be proactive in surveying your guests with regard to their connectivity experience. Find out if it meets their needs.
• If you see a lot of people in your lobby every day, that might be a hint that the room connectivity is poor.
• Do a signal strength survey of the rooms. Map out your coverage and take measures to provide additional coverage. (ie. better antennas on the WAPs, more access points etc).

As far as my situation, I ended up using my Sprint cellular aircard instead of the hotel wireless. That worked quite well. However hotels and resorts would do well to look into the situation.

Travel wifi - Beware of the evil twin

I came across something the other day that is interesting for those who use wifi while traveling.

There is an attack known as an 'evil twin' attack. The attacker creates a wifi host with a name similar to, or the same as, that used by a hotel, cafe or other hotspot. They broadcast from a location near the real hotspot. In some cases, they might have disabled the real hotspot.

Unsuspecting users connect to what they think is a legitimate wifi access point. In reality, they are simply being redirected BUT, everything they do, including credit cards and passwords, can be recorded.

The attacker doesn't need sophisticated equipment. They could simply have a laptop in their briefcase.

The danger in this type of attack is that it is difficult to detect, even for relatively sophisticated users. There are a few things that you can do to lessen your vulnerability:

• Be aware that 'evil twin' attacks can occur.
• Minimize access to sites with sensitive information while using public wifi (including wifi at hotels)
• Never use the same ID and password for all of your websites. In fact, every site you use should have it's own unique code. If the perpetrator of an evil twin gets your ebay id/pw and you use the same id/pw for paypay, you are compromised. (All, they need to do is try the ID/PW combo that they get from one site you visit on other major sites)
• Pay attention to the urls in the address bar. Double check to make sure that the address is exactly way you want.. ie www.paypal.com and not something like www.paypa1.com
• It would be a good idea to change the passwords for sensitive accounts that you access while traveling before and after your travels (and maybe even during the travel). This is a bit of work but it could minimize the damage.
• If you use a web based email client, see if there is an option for a secure login. Keep in mind that this provides only a minimal amount of additional security.
• Make sure that you know how to set your firewall so that any wireless connection is listed as 'untrusted'. Again, this does not provide a lot of additional security but it will help a bit.

Here is one tip that is worth listing seperately: Use a cellular card instead of wifi. You can get 'unlimited' cellular broadband for about $70/month. Cellular broadband keeps your communications on your carrier's network. It cannot be spoofed the same way as wifi. Keep in mind that there are some allegations that certain providers will drop you if they believe you are using too much bandwidth

At some point, there will have to be some means of positively identifying the wifi connection that you are using. Until a workable system is found, it pays to be prudent, or even paranoid.

Low cost temporary fix for Palm Digitizer drift

My Palm Zire 31 has been experiencing some drift in the digitizer which has required almost daily digitizer recalibration. Today it would not calibrate properly. No matter what I did, the point it though I was touching was about 1mm below where I was actually touching with the stylus. When I tried to calibrate and hit the targets, it would not calibrate. The only way to get out of that screen was to tap the top of the targets.

I did some checking and downloaded one of the software digitizer calibration fixes, Digifix. That behaved exactly like the built in digitizer calibrator. I tried removing the screen protector film and cleaning the screen with a damp cloth... No luck there either.

I have been keeping my Palm in an aluminum Palm case. Once in a while, I drop the Palm, either when it's in its case or not in its case. I thought about it and decided a couple of taps on the top or bottom edge might work.

NOTE - This may damage your Palm or void your warranty. Use at your own risk. It might also put a ding in your beautiful dining room set so be careful.

Anyway, what I did was to open up the Note Pad application, which is really a drawing app. I could see that the lines were forming OK on the horizontal axis. I tapped the unit on either the top or bottom 3 times with a sharp but gentle tap(Unfortunately, I can't remember which). The one way didn't change anything so I tried the other way. IT WORKED!!!.

I re-ran the digitizer calibration and everything seems to be OK.

Keep in mind that this is probably only a temporary fix and may end up killing your handheld. On the other hand, I'm up to my ears in alligators so this will buy me some time.