[dobbin]

Let's ask Barb :

Well Dave, thanks for your question, its an interesting one. We at Microsoft love criminals, hell - some of us actually are criminals! We all have flash cars and big houses we need to keep maintained, and we need your help, hence we introduce measures such as this to prevent you from installing pretty much anything useful if you haven't contributed to our pension funds. Unfortunately, whilst cracks do exist for the windows activation stuff, they wouldnt allow you to do updates still, and the only way I know for this to work would be for you to use a Volume license key (or VLK), but that would mean either more skullduggery to change to one, or a rebuild

So basically, if I were you, I would go back to WPA. No need for the patch then innit...

[dave]

no worries - my incarcerated acquaintance had the bright idea of using the works computer in his chain-link-making-shop (which has sa fully legit copy of XP) to download the update onto his prison-issue USB drive, and then installed that onto the machine in his cell no problems. He awarded himself some snout and a good slug of toilet cistern hooch by way of a celebration.

[slackline]

The hoops you have to jump through to get a free, up-to-date operating system 

[fatdoc]

firstly: everything slackline says is gospel, then man is a genius.

secondly: why not toss the whole WPA thing off? just get the roota to accept certain devices with MAC identity yuo have configured the roota to accept?
Previous threads have outlined the falability of WEP and to degree WPA..

that would be a quick fix / ensure you know what is really going wrong.

My bet is on anything belkin, coz their stuff is all toss IMO.

[dave]

don't worry i've already sacked off the belkin. a linksys is in the pipeline.

I would do the MAC thing but the problem is everytime i thinkabout it I get flashbacks to this guy.

[fatdoc]

you lost me there..

unless it's an embedded image (i'm on a windows 2000 dead dinosaur of a PC at work) cos I cant see them!

[dobbin]

articles in the daily mail will tell you to do three things to secure your wireless network. these are :

1: set a password (WEP or WPA)
2: MAC filtering (what the good doc said)
3: Turn off SSID broadcast

So, WEP is easy to circumvent - about a minute for anyone who know what they are doing, WPA can be cracked brute force only, WPA2 not PSK = much better. PSK is Pre Shared Key - or password. It will always be brute force crackable. The only workable standard (for a corporate) is to use certificates.

Mac filtering permits only authorised stations to connect, but its very easy to listen to the network and spoof the mac address of an authorised station. For an advanced (ish) user.

Turning SSID broadcast is only valid whilst noone is using the network. As soon as you connect, a sniffer will detect the traffic and its easy to get the SSID from there.

So, by all means do all three. it will lock out all but the most persistent attacker. The point to take from all this is that you should still run a software firewall on your computers, especially if you have wireless.