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I've moved this blog to the pretentiously named philtheone.com. All the stuff from here is on there! Follow me..

Freebie

I've received a couple of emails about a short film called Blackpool: The Las Vegas of the North. Presumably a tongue-in-cheek title.

Anyway it's on today on VBS TV so it might be worth a look if you're interested.

Here's the blurb:

In January of this year, Vice editor Andy Capper and filmmaker Leo Leigh (son of director Mike Leigh, no less) spent a fortnight in the North West resort of Blackpool. In amongst the fish’n’chips and fruit machines they got to know the characters who make up the area, and uncovered the unique charm behind the seaside town.

Once Britain’s number one holiday destination, Blackpool has been growing old disgracefully. The refinement and grace has given way to a certain romantic grit, as pigeon fanciers, 80 year-old tattoo addicts and hotel talent shows mask the backstreet slums and high rise buildings characterise the area crippled by 90% unemployment.

“Blackpool: The Las Vegas Of The North” is an intimate snapshot of the people behind the local legends, showing there is more to this corner of Britain than blue comics, soft porn pedlars and immigrant strippers. And not a Big Dipper pun in sight...

The sky is the limit

"Fly to Europe for only £9.99!"

You've probably seen these adverts on the television or in the newspapers, and indeed probably used one or more of the airlines as well. I certainly have.

But having today booked some flights to Spain I was going off the wall: firstly about the difference between the advertised price and the actual price and secondly the way they remove standard essentials from the flight and then charge you for them as an extra.

Get to the airport and check in and on these budget airlines you cannot reserve a seat like you used to be able to. They'll happily charge you for the privilege though.

Luggage is another example: you have to pay extra to take a suitcase. They say it's a saving for those that don't need to carry any luggage, but it's not. It's an increase in price for those that do.

Then there's the in-flight meal. Generally you got a light meal of some kind on any flight longer than an hour or so but now you have to buy it for a ridiculous price. This is something I don't particularly mind because aircraft meals are terrible but the price never went down because of it.

Ryanair announced that using the toilet will soon be a chargeable extra and further ahead they are intending to convert portions of their aircraft to standing room only so they can then charge you extra - for a seat!

The result is when you see advertising for different airlines you can never compare them at face value because they all drop various standard features and charge you extra for them.

Jet2 have been advertising flights to Spain for £9.99 on the TV all the time recently. They quoted me £160 return. They might as well have said the flights are free - except for all the extra stuff we add on.

And don't even think about bringing any extra luggage home....

Ruling the airwaves

If you could get away with committing an offence knowing that from the point of view of the authorities someone else did it, would you?

I opened my netbook today and decided to search for wifi access points within the vicinity of my home and discovered a total of 14 unique networks including my own. I was surprised by this as I don't live in a particularly densely populated area.

My first impression from the list of network names was of slight bewilderment that some of them were named after either the operator or their house number and street. Free information.

Not especially useful to me really, but now that I knew some of their names I decided to see how far I could potentially go in order to become one of these people from the comfort of my chair.

Approaching this, I knew that many of the wireless routers supplied by ISPs are configured by default to use a weak security algorithm called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) rather than the much more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

WEP was determined to be an insecure security algorithm in 2001 and was deprecated by the IEEE because it did not serve the purpose it was designed for - to secure your network. It can be cracked within a few minutes with freely available tools. In fact my own ISP, O2, supplied me with a router that was configured with WEP enabled by default, leaving my network wide open for anyone with a few minutes spare.

Knowing this, I decided to boot my netbook into Backtrack:a linux distribution focused on network auditing and security. It's a nice distribution and can be burned on to a USB stick or DVD for use as a "live" system. Opening kismet I discovered some more details about the wireless connections in my area.

I was interested in finding out whether they were using WEP or WPA. It's possible to brute force attack a WPA secured network but it could take longer than the universe will exist to crack. Anyway, within minutes I had retrieved the keys for all of the WEP secured wireless networks in my area. The Aircrack website details how to use the tools to do it if you're interested.

At this point I could bridge all of these networks and load up any of my favourite peer-to-peer software with lots of music, films and games shared and from the point of view of the BPI or any other organisation that attempts to monitor our internet usage it would be my neighbours who were doing it. As a result, they'd get the BPI threat letter and any resulting court action. Perfect!

It's surprising in these days of fraud, identity theft, ID cards and 24/7 surveillance that people have such a blase attitude towards protecting their own identity. I do however think it's bad sport for ISPs to supply hardware that is preconfigured in such a way that your home or small business network can be compromised by anyone that wants to use it.

Is it fair to assume that an ISP will supply hardware that is as secure as it can be upon installation? I think so. Consumers should not be expected to be knowledgeable about the technicalities of wireless encryption methods. Indeed, the consumer may not even have a wireless enabled computer yet their network would be wide open and they wouldn't even know.

I await the case whereby someone that didn't do anything wrong actually gets prosecuted based on what they are perceived to have been sharing. Who would be liable? The consumer or the ISP for supplying hardware that permitted anyone to use it?

Top of the Phorm

Success! Shares in Phorm dived 40% yesterday when BT said it wouldn't be using their system (although they have not fully terminated their agreement with them).

Phorm is a company started by people that made money by infecting your computer with spyware that now offers a similar service that you can do nothing about. At the ISP level, they spy on your web usage and provide targetted advertising based on it.

Carphone Warehouse/Talktalk have also pulled out and the only remaining ISP with a commitment to Phorm is - you guessed it - Virgin Media.

Apparently Phorm are now focusing their business on Asia and have gained a foothold in South Korea. I suspect they are probably used to being spied on though.