Clearing up Wi-Fi

An article from Laptop magazine about Wi-Fi helped clear up some confusion regarding the best options to stop people from hacking into my wireless network: it was suggested to enable WPA (instead of the more common WEP). The secret of WPA being that it uses a technology called TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) to change the passwords on a continual basis, requiring someone to have not only the right key to access your data, but having it at the right time as well. Read the article here.

I would recommend an excellant reference book by Glenn Fleishman and Adam Engst titled The Wireless Networking Starter Kit. I often refer to it for common problems that come up with the wireless connections I depend on with my PDA. The book also offers some useful tips about using Wi-Fi while traveling…..such as turning off your network card to save battery power and investing in a Privacy Filter from 3M to help thwart ’shoulder surfers’ (topic of a previous post on InFlightHQ).