Internet access while on the road

I was in Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul this week on the way to and from a conference. Internet access is easier than ever while traveling, but the fees could add up.

Port Columbus claims to have WiFi access, but I couldn't find it. No signal at all. I didn't need WiFi access at Port Columbus because I'd just arrived from home and had recently done everything on-line that I needed to do. Perhaps the access is in limited areas as it is at Dallas-Fort Worth. On the way to the conference, I spent some time in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport even though my flight was scheduled to go through Milwaukee. The plane experienced an oil pressure problem and the airline booked me on another airline to limit the delay. On the way back, I had a 3-hour layover in Milwaukee, which was followed by the cancellation of the flight because of bad weather, then another hour in the airport the next morning.

Both the Milwaukee and Minneapolis-St. Paul airports have widely available WiFi. I didn't use either one, though because a $10 "day pass" seems a bit pricey for a few hours worth of service. What was surprising this time around was the availability of free WiFi access in my hotel room.

I spent most of the week in Kansas City at a conference that was being held in a name brand "suite" hotel that offers "free" breakfast and "free" happy hour (for $130 per night) but if you want Internet access, the choices are slow dial-up (80 cents for the first hour, then 10 cents per minute) or wireless access ($10 per day extra).

Instead, I stayed about 2 miles away at a Microtel, which offered a small room instead of a suite. The furnishings were much cheaper than at the name brand hotel. The "free" breakfast consisted of cereal, bagels, and fruit instead of omelettes. There was no "free" happy hour. But the Microtel offered "free" high-speed wireless Internet access and the cost, including all taxes, was $61 per night.

Even with the cost of a rental car to get to the conference, I came out ahead. The WiFi signal strength and speed were excellent and the price was certainly right.

On the return trip, I unexpectedly spent Thursday night at a Clarion in Milwaukee. The room was much larger, the furnishings were solid and well made, and the WiFi was free. The signal strength and therefore the speed were only mediocre. I think I know why: The Microtel is new. Despite already looking a bit shabby, the building is still being finished. One outside sign was still sitting in a crate in the parking lot. Because it's a new building, the WiFi equipment was built in. The Clarion in Milwaukee has been there for a while, so the WiFi had to be retrofitted to the building. The same was true for WiFi at the conference hotel in Kansas City: Some of the people who attended said they could get a good signal in their rooms, while others said they could get only a weak signal -- and there it was $10 extra per day.

I write about technology, not travel, but sometimes the two areas merge. Some forward-thinking hotel chains have realized that there is value in offering high-speed Internet access. The truly progressive chains have realized that they can make WiFi an added value and use it to attract business.

The full travel report is here.

Apple amusement

Recently, I talked about the latest version of Apple's operating system (OS X Tiger, 10.4). I said that I'll probably continue to use Windows because that's the operating system I'm most familiar with, but that wasn't enough for a listener in Gallion. To please him, I would have had to prostrate myself and proclaim OS X the "best" operating system. Well, I'm not willing to do that. (Nor am I willing to say that Windows is the "best" operating system. Or Linux.)

Amusing message from a Mac evangelist in Gallion: "I guess if I made my living making MS Windows work, I'd feel like you. You allowed that there is finally an Apple OS that you like (kind of), namely, Tiger. Later in the show you spent, oh, 20 minutes explaining how to defend against viruses et al. on Windows boxes. We Mac snobs feel like freedom from viruses is reason enough to use Mac, other benefits notwithstanding."

Let's take that point by point

"I guess if I made my living making MS Windows work, I'd feel like you."

This assumes that I make a living making MS Windows work. I don't. I make a living working with applications that run on MS Windows machines.

"You allowed that there is finally an Apple OS that you like (kind of), namely, Tiger."

I went a bit further than that. I won't flatly state that any operating system is the "best operating system" because there is no best operating system for all people and all applications. But I do feel that Apple has made Unix easy to use. Apple's operating systems were ahead of Windows until Windows 95 arrived to provide limited memory management, which even the last version of Apple's OS 9 didn't have. Apple went through some difficult times and innovation suffered. Windows was technologically better until OS X version 10.2. The earlier versions were good proofs of concept, but hardly functional operating systems. OS X 10.3 built on the foundation established by 10.0 and 10.1. Tiger (10.4) brings some elegant refinements. I still find some things easier to do on a Windows machine, but that probably is the result of having more experience with Windows.

"Later in the show you spent, oh, 20 minutes explaining how to defend against viruses et al. on Windows boxes."

The entire amount of air time Technology Corner gets in an hour ranges from 17 to 20 minutes total once we take into account news, sports, and commercials. We talked about Super Ad Blocker, Apple's OS X Tiger, a twist on the Nigerian scam, the importance of obtaining a full operating system installation disc when you buy a computer, some new applications from Google, and the W32/Sober worm. The total time spent on Sober was probably about 2 minutes, so the writer was off by only one order of magnitude.

"We Mac snobs feel like freedom from viruses is reason enough to use Mac, other benefits notwithstanding."

Trouble is, it won't always be that way, so enjoy it while you have it. Linux and Unix can be attacked, just as Windows can. It isn't happening yet, in part because the target is smaller and attackers go for the larger target. In the approximately 2 minutes (you were off only by one order of magnitude), we covered general guidelines for all threats -- namely don't open an attachment that's at all suspect.

It's unlikely that the Mac will ever be my primary platform because I depend too much on applications that aren't available on the platform and running them in a Virtual PC session is just too slow. But, as I said on the show, if I didn't have 20+ years of experience with DOS/Win/Intel and if I was buying my first computer today, it would probably be a Mac. In fact, I own more Macs than PCs these days. Even so, I still spend far more time on the PCs.

My reply to the Gallion correspondent, however, came from a Powerbook running Tiger -- the same computer I took with me on the trip to Kansas City.

OS X Vulnerability

Apple's operating system was built from the ground up with file and directory permissions, password access, and networking in mind. These are all features that Microsoft has added over the years. Many Mac users believe that OS X is completely immune to attack. That kind of thinking is dangerous.

MaxFixIt, a well-respected site that helps Mac users fix their computers when something goes wrong wrote on Monday about a problem with OS X 10.4 (Tiger). The headline ("Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) #12: Malicious Widget Installation") made the situation sound worse than it really was, but I quote:

Malicious Widget Installation Over the weekend, a Mac OS X user named Stephan posted a Web page demonstrating a vulnerability in Tiger's Widget architecture that could allow malicious JavaScript programs to be installed when automatically when visiting a Web site.

The vulnerability only occurs if the option to "Open 'safe' files after downloading" is turned on in Safari's preferences. Safari will, in this case, automatically download and install a widget when the appropriate meta tag is used. You can see a relatively innocuous demonstration of the vulnerability here.

According to the author:

"Let's start with autoinstall. I happen to like it, actually, I think it's a great thing. But, as I have demonstrated here, it has the side effect of setting up a situation where a user can be given an application without their knowledge.

"That's not such a big deal; by default, widgets can't do much damage, and they can't run unless you drop them into your dashboard. The funny thing is that once that widget is there, according to Apple, you cannot remove it. Type 'remove widget' into Apple Help, and you find out:

"You cannot remove widgets from the Widget Bar or change their order. Most of those reading this are probably aware of the workaround - just remove the offending widget from ~/Library/Widgets/. The Dashboard bar is not very good about updating when a widget is removed, but eventually it figures things out."

Several users have compared this issue to vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft's ActiveX system, which also makes use of code that can be auto-opened and executed.

There are some limitations to how much damage this vulnerability can incur, however.

First, any widget that could do serious damage (e.g. deleting a user home folder) will request system access and require the user to provide access via a prompt. As such, the real threat posed by this vulnerability when simply clicking links in Safari is a breakdown in Dashboard's functionality, or further accessing of other URLs in Safari. These issues -- should they occur -- can be resolved, as mentioned above, by deleting the offending Widget from the ~/Library/Widgets folder and restarting Mac OS X.

Second, the user must actually launch Dashboard after the malicious Widget has been downloaded and placed in the ~/Library/Widgets folder before it can execute any code.

Finally, the use of a utility like Paranoid Android will put an extra step between clicking on a potentially malicious link and actual execution of the downloaded file by watching the URL schemes that are requested and asking the user whether or not to proceed.

In the final analysis, the operating system will probably protect the user ... this time. But what about next time. Mac users who believe that their computers will never be attacked are living in a fairy-tale world and they're dangerous.

Nerdly News

Sober again

Last week I sent out a special alert about the German (and occasional English) spams that were flooding into my mailbox. I've heard from others who received a deluge of these, from some who received only a few, and from some who received none at all.

The spams were apparently from some Nazi sympathizers and apologists. The Trojan horse Troj/Sober-Q is being used to send spam from PCs previously infected by the Sober-N worm, so this is yet another reminder for users to ensure that their antivirus software is up to date and that they have at least a software firewall that watches outbound activity.

Sober-N worm spread widely and rapidly. Now the infected PCs are being used to send spam.

The messages have subjects such as "The whore lived like a German," "Verbrechen der deutschen Frau," "Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On," "Volk wird nur zum zahlen gebraucht!" and "Dresden Bombing Is To Be Regretted Enormously."

A recommendation from Sophos, an antivirus company: "Thousands of innocent computer users are unknowingly spewing out this unwanted mail as the Sober author has taken control of their PCs. By including links to news stories about previous variants of the Sober worms, it seems that the author is looking for notoriety, but it's unlikely that the thousands deluged with this spam will take kindly to his tactics. This latest piece of malware highlights the links between virus writers and spammers and reinforces the need for everyone to deploy regularly updated anti-virus and anti-spam software as well as a firewall."

Apple wants 128,000 batteries back

Apple Computer has issued a recall for 128 thousand Ibook and Powerbook computer batteries. To find out if your battery is one of the defective ones, see Apple's website. Apple says consumers should immediately stop using the affected batteries because they pose a fire hazard.

The batteries were manufactured by LG Chem Ltd., of South Korea and the assembly of the products in question was carried out in Taiwan and China. According to Apple, "An internal short can cause the battery cells to overheat, posing a fire hazard." The company says it has received 6 such reports, 2 from the United States.

The recalled lithium ion batteries were manufactured for use with the 12-inch iBook G4, the 12-inch PowerBook G4, and the 15-inch PowerBook G4. Batteries recalled include those with model numbers A1061, A1078, and A1079 and serial numbers that begin with HQ441 through HQ507 or 3X446 through 3X510.

This is Apple's second recall of batteries used in 15-inch Powerbook G4 computers. The batteries involved in the previous recall were also manufactured by LG Chem.

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