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Issue #238: February 12, 2012
Q: I am a snow bird and enjoy your weekly article in the FDN. When I am up north I want to read your column in the online edition. How will I be able to find it? What to search under??
– Charles M.
a.k.a. “Chucky the Badger”
A: I’m flattered to hear you’re such a fan, Charles (may I call you Chucky?). My old columns have always been maintained on the website of the Northwest Florida Daily News. Unfortunately, over time, as the Daily News has implemented new online formats, the location where my column is archived has changed, resulting in an archive that is fragmented over several different locations. I’m told that work is in progress to fix this, so you should be able to view the columns at www.nwfdailynews.com. On the main page, scroll down about halfway and you should see my name, picture, and links to a few recent articles. Open any of those articles, and at the top you’ll see a navigation link that says “Home > Jeff Werner”. Click on my name, and you’ll go to a larger archive. I’ve taken the liberty of creating a TinyURL that should take you directly there. It’s tinyurl.com/3u2hptl. I’d also like you to know that I have a website of my own in the works. It should be up in the next couple of weeks or so. It will eventually contain a complete column archive, as well as tutorials, reviews and other content that I have yet to create. Watch this space for an announcement when the site is ready for prime time.
Q: I have a router in my home with a Wep key for a secured network. It is one of those really long number and letter combinations. This is proving to be quite a pain. We have frequent house guests who would like to use our internet connection. Is there a way to change this password to something simpler?
– Lois T.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
A: WEP, which stands for “Wired Equivalent Privacy” is an obsolete technology. The standard that implemented it was approved in 1999, but it was retired in 2004 because, in the words of the IEEE it “failed to meet their security goals.” In other words, it was proven to be neither private, nor the equivalent to wired security. And yes, it was also a real pain to enter the 10, 26, or 58 character “initialization vector” that forms the basis of a WEP key.
WEP was supplanted by WiFi Protected Access, or WPA, which is only slightly more secure than WEP. You really should be using the more modern, and far more secure WPA2. If your router doesn’t support WPA2, I would respectfully suggest you are way overdue for an upgrade. Regarding that awkward key, rather than the hexadecimal gibberish of a WEP key, WPA2 security is implemented by a user-supplied passphrase between 8 and 63 characters long. Be careful of trading security for convenience! Short pass phrases increase your vulnerability to password cracking. According to one expert in the field, a passphrase of less than 20 characters is unlikely to deter attacks. This all assumes, of course, that there are expert WiFi hackers roaming your neighborhood, trying to hack into your home network for some nefarious purpose. In this humble Geek’s opinion, that is unlikely. Still, why leave the door unlocked when it’s so simple to turn the key?
By the way, unless you trust your house guests absolutely, giving them your WiFi password isn’t necessarily wise. Someone with just a little knowledge of networking can access all of the computers attached to your home network once they’re on your WiFi. That means all your financial records, photos, e-mails, letters, etc. One way around that (especially attractive if you’re in the market for a new router after reading this) is a dual-band router. These nifty devices actually implement two separate wireless networks within your house. Some people use them to keep multimedia traffic such as streaming movies and video game consoles separate from regular data such as web browsing and e-mail, but such a router can also be configured to be one private network and one guest network.
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