How to Spot a Millionaire

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The Microsoft XBox 360

I just discovered how versatile the Xbox can be - it’s not just a simple gaming console, it’s an entire home entertainment system in one small box! If you have Windows Media Center, or a Zune, then you can connect these devices up very easily. Imagine having your songs on your PC, and then being able to stream any song wireless to your Xbox. That’s the power of the media extenders that Microsoft has developed, and the ease at which consumers can do this is one major draw of the devices. If your devices all on the same network (which they most probably are), then having the devices discover each other is a piece of cake, and you’ll be streaming music, photos and videos wireless around in your house, among devices.

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Samsung i780 (Touchscreen Windows Mobile 6 Device) Reviewed

My Palm Treo 650 finally gave up the ghost, so I have to search for its replacement, and it came in the form of the new Samsung i780. It’s a sleek, black touch-screen Windows Mobile 6 device, and the first thing I realised is how slim it is compared to my old Treo!

My first day with it was absolutely horrible though — I hated the default Windows Mobile interface. It felt clunky, things loaded slowly, and it looked ugly. So I went around searching for a solution, and found it in the freeware interface, PointUI.

After I installed it, the Samsung i780 felt so much snappier and easier to use. Just check out the video of the PointUI interface on my Samsung i780:

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Protect Your Wireless Network with MAC Address Filtering…A Bad Idea

To secure your wireless network, you can use a variety of means, and one of which is by selecting only what MAC addresses are allowed. This is known as MAC filtering, and it can serve as a basic deterrent against most opportunistic attackers.

However, just using MAC filtering alone will probably be a bad idea. It doesn’t take much determination or knowledge at all to spoof a MAC address. In fact, it’s actually quite easy to spoof a MAC address, and can be done within 2 steps.

Step 1. Download and run any freely available security tool, for example Nmap. Set it to listen in on network traffic and pick out the MAC address.
Step 2. Change your MAC address to the one you picked out.

In fact, Nmap even allows you to spoof your MAC address by running the “-spoof-mac” command line option. This was originally intended to hide the true source of Nmap probes.

If you don’t have Nmap, you can just spoof your MAC address with the software that comes with most operating systems.

Here are some examples:

1. Linux: ifconfig eth0 hw ether 02:a1:13:d4:00:12

2. MS Windows: the MAC address is stored in a registry key (location of that key varies from one MS Windows version to the next, but you can easily find that and just edit it yourself). Alternatively, download a free tool such as Macshift to help you change your MAC address.

Now that you know how easy it is to spoof your MAC address, start worrying even more, because these simple steps are run automatically and very, very quickly by malware. This means that if you are using MAC filtering to protect your wireless network, you should seriously consider something a little more robust.

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Ever Wondered What “EZ” Stands For In Elevators?

While on the elevator, I noticed the floor display screen sometimes showing “EZ” instead of the floor number. That got me curious about what “EZ” meant, so I went sniffing around and discovered that “EZ” stood for “Express Zone”.

Apparently, express elevators sometime move so quickly that it isn’t feasible to show the floor numbers just flashing past, so they display EZ instead.

Ha. Learnt something new.

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