Does Cablevision's WiFi service actually work?

Cablevision (http://cablevision.com) offers WiFi service on many municipal areas around Long Island. It's freely available to their Optimum Online customers - you just have to provide your user id and password to their login page and you're in. Read their spiel on the Optimum Online site.

Except it doesn't actually work. I have tried it from a number of locations in the past few months and it consistently fails in 3 ways.

1. It requires a new login each time. This is just silly. They could authorize you once and register your MAC address in their DHCP database.
2. Half of the time, you might get signal and an IP address, but they don't assign you a DNS server. This is just plain old fail.
3. When you do get a connection, IP address and DHCP server, their transparent HTTP proxy which redirects you to their login page is rarely responds. You just sit their waiting. My guess is that this is just severe under-provisioning.

But, it's a wonderful service on paper. It sounds useful, and as long as they don't deploy enough resources to make it work, it doesn't cost anything to provide!

Don't touch that USB dongle that came in the mail

My wife found an advertising insert from a AstraZeneca (pharmaceuticals) in a recent medical journal. It was a little USB dongle that promised to tell you more about some recent drug they were pitching.

It turns out that the dongle is quite a nasty piece of work. It's not a USB drive at all, but it impersonates an Apple keyboard (ID 05ac:020b Apple, Inc. Pro Keyboard [Mitsumi, A1048/US layout]). When you plug it in, it attempts to type a command line to direct your web browser to their site. I little research uncovered that American Express was doing this last October. This appears to be an identical device. Read more here: http://seclists.org/risks/2009/q4/3

And that is an interesting story too. I broke open the shell to find a small board with a KYP logo and a model tag "Web Key". KYP is a marketing company, rather than an electronics firm, and they seem quite proud of this little baby.. You can read more here: http://www.kyp.com/Our-work.aspx?tag=Webkey

Let's hope the 2010 Quicken for Mac is not so dumb

Let me just say that I like Quicken. I have used it since 1990 (starting in DOS). It generally does what I expect, aside from a few deficiencies. But one problem is inexcusable - the Mac version puts important information in forks of the files. The problem is that if you want to back up and restore your files you must use a backup system that preserves the fork data. This severely limits your backup options. I *might* understand this unfortunate choice if it was a pure Mac app, but the Quicken code base has to run on Windows too. They had the technology to do this entirely in plain old data files but went out of their way to do extra work to make it less robust. That's just bad engineering.

Newsday.com business model fail

I stopped subscribing to Newsday about 5 years ago, when it dumbed itself
down beyond what I could take any more. What was going Dolan's mind
when he decided that the Newsday web site was worth paying a subscription
fee for? After 3 months, they picked up 35 subscribers. Read the full story

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site

Choose your next TV by it's remote control

I recently purchased a new TV. It happens to be an RCA L32HD31R (which I'm happy to explicitly name, because there is no point in protecting the guilty). It's not ultra high-end - it's a fairly run of the mill 32" LCD. It is certainly not meant to be the centerpiece of an impressive home theater. So I have to ask why does RCA think they have to provide a remote control which uses different codes than all that have gone before?

Some small percentage of people might connect their TV directly to an antenna, but the much larger majority use their TV as little more than a display with speakers. They select their channel with a cable box or their Tivo (sorry DVR, we don't want Tivo to become another Klennex/Xerox). What people require is that their TV remote uses standard codes that every universal remote know about. They want exactly 3 functions from the TV remote - on/off, volume, and switch to the DVD input.

Engineers at RCA: Come on, guys. This is not rocket science. You don't have to invent new things. Your jobs is to adopt existing standards. Coming up with a a set of remote codes that is incompatible with previous RCA products - or ANYONE ELSE'S - is an act of hubris. You either think you are smarter than other electrical engineers (trust me, you're not) or that your products are so compellingly awesome that customers will not want to toss your remote in the drawer and use the universal that came with the cable box (trust me, your products are not and the customers will).

CableCards and Truck Rolls - Why?

I'm not really a TV watcher, so I've never bothered with more than basic cable and an old POS VCR for time-shifting. But, my wife religiously follows "So You Think You Can Dance" and is often out on Wednesday evenings, so I succumbed and bought a TiVo last month. I have only good things to say about the TiVo. It does what it is supposed to as a DVR, let's me stream Netflix to it, and a bunch of other stuff.

But, WTF with Cablevision requiring a truck roll to install an M-card in the TiVo. Here is what is required.
1. Plug in the card
2. Wait a while. In this case it was about 45 minutes while the m-card (not the TiVo) required a firmware update.
3. Copy a few numbers off the screen
4. Call a dispatcher and tell them the number

Now, I fully understand how there is no up-channel with the current DOCSIS standard, so the card can't inform CableVision directly that it has bonded with the TiVo. But seriously, do we need a tech to come out and read a few numbers? I get the feeling they keep it difficult to discourage 3rd party boxes as opposed to their own (less flexible) offerings.

How can we fix this?

When you call to ask for the m-card installation, they could offer self-install. For that, they send you a card and a set of instructions which point you do their web site. The site guides you through the procedure (for various DVR models) and leads you to a page where you can enter the numbers. In fact, they could even charge you a $20 activation fee and it would still be cheaper for everyone and more convenient as well.

Should ISPs that break DNS face criminal charges?

I was sitting in my hotel room doing some work this evening and I accidentally followed a link in email to a company internal web site. In a world where the rules of the internet are obeyed, my web browser should have given me a "Page not found" error, because that site is not visible in any way from the outside world. I was not in that world tonight.

Instead, the ISP which this hotel uses has hooked up with OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com/). OpenDNS does something unforgivably wrong. It lies about not finding the web site and directs your request to it's own servers. The result is that my web browser happily passes the full request to OpenDNS. This request contains a URL which could leak proprietary information.

Now, in my case, this is only corporate information. But, what if I had been an employee of the federal government? I think a judge would have to consider that this might be a violation of section 6 of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC 1030). It's a question of using incorrect information to get my computer to release information that it otherwise should not.

To be fair, it's not only OpenDNS that does this. I've run into this problem all over the country, in hotels and with residential ISPs. At home, Cablevision does the same thing. They do give you an opportunity to opt-out, but you have to understand the danger of their practice before you would choose that. That's not really enough, business practices should protect people by default, not by option. Comcast is also one of the guilty players in this game, with their "DNS Helper" service. Yeah - big help.