Tomato Firmware: Increased Transmit Power Does More Harm Than Good?

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I had turned the routers up to 80 mW and the problem was still occurring. Upon some research I found that as the Transmit power levels of the routers increased, so did the radio noise produced by the routers. I decided to turn the routers back down, to a level lower than when I first began to administer the network. After this change, users noticed an immediate improvement in the quality of their wireless connections. Everything was (and still is) running stable. The users are no longer losing Internet connection and are maintaining proper network speeds.

via Tomato Firmware: Increased Transmit Power Does More Harm Than Good? | Techerator.

I’m seeing the same thing with the Tomato firmware.  The firmware is nicer than Linksys but I thought increasing the power of this router would increase the range but I suppose it’s more complicated than that.

Packetstan: NBNS Spoofing on your way to World Domination

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Since the look up is just a hostname, windows adds the local DNS suffix to the query and asks its DNS server(s). The suffix picked up my the Windows box usually comes from the DHCP server. As you can see, the DNS server replied that it had no idea on how to lookup that name. Next, you’ll see the NBNS Request. The beautiful thing is, the NBNS Request is a broadcast, so anyone can reply easily and redirect traffic.

via Packetstan: NBNS Spoofing on your way to World Domination.

NetBIOS/NBNS

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NBNS serves much the same purpose as DNS does: translate human-readable names to IP addresses e.g. www.wireshark.org to 65.208.228.223. As NetBIOS can run on top of several different network protocols e.g. IP, IPX, …, other implementations of the NetBIOS services have their own mechanisms for translating NetBIOS names to addresses. NBNS’s services are more limited, in that NetBIOS names exist in a flat name space, rather than DNS’s hierarchical one multiple flat name spaces can exist, by using NetBIOS scopes, but those are rarely used, and NBNS can only supply IPv4 addresses; NBNS doesn’t support IPv6.

via NetBIOS/NBNS – The Wireshark Wiki.

Education | parallel.illinois.edu

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For this reason, education is among the primary missions of the Parallel Computing Institute. With offerings ranging from complete curricula in parallel computing through the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in Computer Science, to just-in-time workshops and seminars, PCI offers a broad selection of options for students and professionals and collaborates with organizations such as the CUDA Center of Excellence, the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, the Cloud Computing Testbed, and NCSA, among others, to make their offerings widely available.

via Education | parallel.illinois.edu.

Loopholes in Verified by Visa & SecureCode

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At issue is a security protocol called “3 Domain Secure,” (3DS), a program designed to reduce card fraud and shift liability for fraud from online merchants to the card issuing banks. Visa introduced the program in 2001, branding it “Verified by Visa,” and MasterCard has a similar program in place called “SecureCode.”

Cardholders who chose to participate in the programs can register their card by entering the card number, filling in their ZIP code and birth date, and picking a passcode. When cardholders go to use that card at a merchant site that uses 3DS, the shopper then enters the code, which verified by the issuing bank and is never shared with the merchant site.

via Loopholes in Verified by Visa & SecureCode — Krebs on Security.

Free Local and Long Distance Calling with netTALK’s DUO

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Free Local and Long Distance Calling with netTALK’s DUO.

North America $70/year, International $120/year.  This seems like a Skype competitor.  It looks like there’s a piece of hardware that comes with this that can be seen here.

Here‘s how it works.  You don’t need a computer — just plug the device into the router and phone.  I noticed an HTC device trying to connect SIP to this outfit so they must have an Android app as well.

The TCP Datagram

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push flag (1 bits)

The push flag tells the receiving end of the tcp connection to “push” all buffered data to the receiving application. It basically says “done for now”.

via The TCP Datagram.

This would be the PSH flag that I needed to look up and found this site which makes for a good reference.