Anonymous Reader writes: “Esfia will demonstrate a new low-cost Chinese Linux-based PDA at the Taipei Linux Expo this week. The device, which is based on a Samsung ARM7 system-on-chip processor and is available with a color or monochrome backlit 320×240 pixel LCD, was developed by Esfia to provide a ready-to-use Linux-PDA technology solution for license to companies wanting to distribute low-cost Linux-based PDAs in either the China or worldwide markets. Story here at LinuxDevices.com.”

Walker Whitehouse writes: Sandstorm Enterprises announces the commercial availability of NetIntercept 1.1, the second major release of their network forensics and analysis tool that runs on FreeBSD. Sandstorm debuted NetIntercept 1.1 at GOVSEC in Washington DC. Demonstrations included the patent-pending decryption of SSH2 traffic.
Sandstorm has made significant improvements to NetIntercept’s ability to capture and analyze network traffic. NetIntercept 1.1 decrypts SSH2 traffic from modified hosts, recognizes over 60 types of data streams, including common productivity software and multimedia file formats, graphically displays connections between hosts on the network, and views web pages reconstructed from network traffic. The 1.1 release also makes significant steps toward compliance with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d), which requires that Federal agencies make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

“NetIntercept was designed for IT personnel who are serious about network monitoring,” says Sandstorm President James Van Bokkelen. “Being invisible on the network, providing secure remote administration, and drilling down through multiple layers of encryption, compression, and transfer encoding to see connections usefully make NetIntercept an extremely powerful tool for any network administrator.?

NetIntercept, first released in October of 2001, has attracted interest from both government and corporate clients. As a network forensics and analysis tool, it has received favorable press coverage in Information Security magazine.

NetIntercept runs on a modified FreeBSD system, and is available in both single- and dual-processor configurations. “With this release, we are able to provide high-level network forensics to organizations working with tighter budgets,” states Rickland Powell, Director of Sales. “Our low-end systems offer high-quality network monitoring and analysis starting at only $7,500.” Decryption of SSH2 traffic to and from monitored hosts is available via a custom modification of OpenSSH, which runs on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and many other Unix variants..

Find out more about NetIntercept or download the datasheet at www.netintercept.com.

About Sandstorm Enterprises

Sandstorm Enterprises, based in Boston, Massachusetts, provides “tools with sharp edges” to information security professionals. Sandstorm develops aggressive computer security tools for auditing, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and active engagements. PhoneSweep, Sandstorm’s first product, was the first commercial telephone scanner (“war dialer”), and is used in over 35 countries. Visit us on the Web at www.sandstorm.net.
Sandstorm Enterprises, NetIntercept and PhoneSweep are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sandstorm Enterprises Inc. Patents pending.

Contact: Sandstorm Enterprises Inc.
Phone: 617 426-5056
Media Contact: press@sandstorm.net
Sales Contact: sales@sandstorm.net

LinuxJournal.com has the letter from David Sugar, GNU Bayonne Project maintainer. ” As a US citizen and taxpayer, I am outraged by reports of the behavior and actions of our former ambassador to Peru, John R. Hamilton, in interfering with the passage of Bill 1609 by the Peruvian Legislature. While I fully understand that Mr. Hamilton’s duties as an ambassador representing our national interests in Peru certainly include economic and commercial interests, the position of our government can never be to represent the sole interests of one commercial entity over those of other US companies, many of whom, as it happens, would find economic benefit in the open market in commercial software that 1609 would create in Peru …”

An anonymous coward writes: “Red Hat Linux 7.4/8.0 on the move. MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.com) reports: “Red Hat placed the second beta of … [its] next distribution, Red Hat Linux/x86 7.3.93 (Limbo), on its public FTP servers today. It likely will be called either Red Hat Linux 7.4 or Red Hat Linux 8.0. Limbo uses the 2.4.19-pre10-ac2 Linux kernel release. The Netscape Web browser has been removed … GNOME version 2.0 is now included … The Apache HTTP server has been updated to version 2.0.” Check this MozillaQuest.com story for, details, links, and full story!“

“An informant in the channel writes alleging Microsoft customers (or even more so,
non-Microsoft customers) have an opportunity to achieve spectacular discounts in
the last-minute sales rush before tomorrow’s Licensing 6.0 deadline. As you know,
31st July is your absolute last chance to do something about your Microsoft
licensing situation prior to the new regime kicking in tomorrow, and as you also may
have heard, many customers remain deeply unenthusiastic.” More at The Register.

Mark Anderson writes: “Developers, admins and security specialists alike meet to discuss the current state of computer security and the need for change.”

http://www.hivercon.com/ — Dublin, Ireland will be the venue for this year’s HiverCon. With a rich line-up of high-end technical talks, guests will be given the unprecedented opportunity to meet and learn from the industry leaders on a one to one basis. While covering core problems such as web insecurity and intrusion detection, HiverCon 2002 will also feature talks on the security implications of current and prominent technologies such as Voice over IP and wireless networking.

HiverCon prides itself on its deep knowledge stance, openly discussing unrealised problems and discussing new and innovative solutions. Perhaps the highlight of the two day conference will be the much anticipated keynote speech by Richard Thieme (thiemeworks.com) who will provide a unique and refreshing look at new ways of thinking about computer security.

Rain Forest Puppy (wiretrip.net) will be presenting a talk detailing vulnerable webservers and will include a sampling of an Internet-wide web server scan run by rfp.labs. He will also be making available a new version of the Whisker web assessment tool.

Ofir Arkin (atstake.com) will be speaking on his current area of research, Voice over IP, covering the security issues with VoIP based protocols. The talk will also examine ways to bypass any element in a VoIP architecture.

Simple Nomad (bindview.com) will be discussing stenography, digital drop boxes, covert channels and more in an effort to take the current press regarding terrorists on the internet and seeing how “real world” it actually is.

HiverCon will be accepting submissions for talks until September 6th, after which the final speakers will be announced. For more information on submitting a talk please see the Call For Papers on the website.

Biographies of the speakers as well as information on their talks can be found on the HiverCon website http://www.hivercon.com/ The Burlington Hotel will be hosting HiverCon 2002 in the heart of Dublin city. Details of the hotel, travel and up-to-date conference news is available on the website.

Early registration begins on August 1st and will run until the cutoff date. The Burlington Hotel has graciously reserved a block of reduced cost hotel rooms for HiverCon guests.

Contact mark@hivercon.com for more information.”

”

Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company’s Tru64 Unix operating system.

In a letter sent on Monday, an HP vice president warned SnoSoft, a loosely organized research collective, that its members “could be fined up to $500,000 and imprisoned for up to five years” for its role in publishing information on a bug that lets an intruder take over a Tru64 Unix system.” More at News.com.

Anonymous Reader writes: “We have enough distributions already, writes Dennis E. Powell in his weekly column on Linux and Main, and someone who wants to start a Linux company might look into acquiring and maintaining now-dead commercial Linux applications, such as those formerly from Corel, which left a gap that hasn’t been filled. For all the strengths of free software, he writes, a focus on keeping the system resources needed to a minimum seems to have been left out.”

– By Robin “Roblimo” Miller –
It’s a national phenomenon: All over the United States, small-town and rural Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) are springing up, often because wireless is the only practical way to bring broadband Internet access to the areas they serve. These are not hobbyists using consumer-grade 802.11b equipment, but professionals hoping to make substantial money providing professional-level service. And some — but not all — of these entrepreneurs are starting to become profitable even though most of them have offered wireless service for less than a year.
Frederick Wireless, of Frederick, Maryland, was founded just under a year ago by local resident Michael J. Dailey, who said he wanted broadband Internet access, failed to find it, and decided there was an opportunity here for an entrepreneur to fill this need. “This is nuts,” he recalls saying to himself when he first decided he needed something faster than dialup. “There’s got to be something here.” But there wasn’t. A small area in downtown Frederick could get DSL, but that was it.

Frederick is home to several colleges, the Army’s Fort Detrick (center of U.S. bio-war research) and a growing number of workers who commute (and telecommute) to the Washington, D.C., area. You’d think it would be a hotbed of broadband access, but it is not. Frederick Wireless is still severely limited in who it can serve from its 12 Points of Presence (POPs). Right now, the effective distance you can be from one of the company’s POPs and get service is two miles, and there had better not be any big obstructions in the way. Dailey says he is currently forced to turn down at least half of all prospective clients because he cannot promise them a clear and consistent connection, a situation he hopes will change as he adds antennas.

Dailey offers home connections for $69 per month, plus equipment and installation, but says he concentrates on business sales. About two thirds of his nearly 100 clients are businesses, and most of them pay between $250 and $500 per month for the equivalent of a fractional T-1. Dailey claims these sales are easy to make because Verizon (the dominant local telco) charges $1,200 per month for a T-1, and the only better-than-dialup alternative they offer to a T-1 line is ISDN at prices that are as high as Dailey charges for much more bandwidth.

The sales track is simple: Cold-call businesses that are within range of the POPs and ask them if they want to sign up. Enough say “yes,” according to Dailey, that his business already makes money and he expects profits to grow steadily in coming years. He is not worried about Verizon suddenly competing with him. “What takes us a day to do takes them months,” he says. “These installs are not easy. This is not a mass market thing.” He points out that there is a lot of roof-climbing involved, and says that while he and his few co-workers have no problem going out and doing some hard work right away — he claims his average time from initial order to working installation is less than a week — “Verizon could have 14 different departments involved” to get one installation in place.

DSL deathwatch

Meanwhile, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bob Merola of AirNet Connect gets customers by watching DSL providers go away, and offering to replace them. If one DSL provider goes down, it can take weeks to find and get hooked up to another one, while Merola claims he can have most new AirConnect customers “up and running within a day or two.” His company has only been offering wireless service since April, but he says he has “20-some” wireless customers already, and is adding more as fast as his crew can install equipment. This is a 100% business-oriented operation, with customers buying $500 to $1,000 worth of equipment (depending on how far they are from the nearest POP), then paying $100 to $350 per month for service. As in Maryland, one of the big reasons businesses sign up is low cost. Merola says Verizon, the major local broadband supplier, charges $800 to $900 per month for the same amount of bandwidth he offers for $350 per month.

Profitable? Not yet, but moving steadily in that direction, and Merola says he has “a year’s worth of funding in the bank” and that at the current sales rate he won’t burn through anywhere near all of it.

The two biggest sales resistances Merola has run into are the perceived insecurity of wireless, which he says is a result of bad publicity about 802.11b, which he doesn’t run — “We’re not using 802.11b because of hacking and security. We’re using frequency-hopping equipment,” he says — and the heavy upfront equipment cost caused by the refusal of local leasing companies to work with ISPs after so many DSL suppliers went broke and left abandoned equipment all over the place. Merola says he’s close to a deal with a leasing company, though, and that once it goes through he’ll be able to sell more accounts more easily.

Merola got into the wireless ISP business “backwards,” he says. His original company, Mariel Technologies, has been in the networking business since 1995. He got involved with DSL users, he says, because most DSL suppliers would run a line to a business premises and leave them on their own from that point in. As for other local ISPs, he says, “They’re good at dialup, but that’s about it.” He saw a market for end-to-end connectivity solutions when DSL providers started to go down all over the place, and decided to step in and fill it.

Merola has one local marina set up as an 802.11b hotspot ($50 per month plus equipment), and uses this service himself — from his boat. He loves the flexibility wireless access gives him. One of his dreams is to cooperate with other local wireless ISPs in the region so that, someday, “You can drive from Boston up to Maine and pull over anywhere along the way and connect from your laptop.”

Slow-talking Alabamans love fast Internet service

You may not be able to get reasonably-priced broadband Internet access in some of the tech-heavy parts of the country, but if you live in Vernon, Alabama, it is no big deal. You hit www.bamacomm.com, the home page of Internet Technology Consultants, Inc. (ITC), and they’ll set you up with a personal wireless account for as little as $50 per month if the trees don’t get in the way. General manager Dave Robertson says, “We turn down as many customers as we hook up because of trees.” Their biggest reliability problem is lightning, but Robertson says that even with lightning outages, their uptime is running well over 99 percent.

High-speed wireless service is new for ITC. They’ve been providing dialup service for about a year and a half, and were already in the PC repair business before that. They have five POPs, and can get up to seven-mile range from the three main ones. Again, we’re talking about commercial-grade, frequency-hopping radio gear here, not consumer-level 802.11b, and Robertson is looking at some new equipment that runs in the 900 MHz band instead of the current stuff that runs 2.4 GHz because, he says, “the 900 MHz signal will go through trees.”

There is no other broadband Internet supplier in town, but Robertson says they still must keep prices down, “because this is a rural area, and people here don’t have a lot of money.” Still, he says local folks tend to have ever-increasing bandwidth needs once they get started; that it’s an easy jump from their $19.95 per month 56K dialup service to $50 per month 128K wireless, to $70 per month 384K wireless.

According to Robertson, ITC’s business is “split about fifty-fifty” between home and business users, with business users paying much more than $50 or $70 per month in most cases. He says the wireless part of the business is already paying its way, even though they only have “about 50 or 60” wireless customers so far. They’re doing a little advertising in the local papers, and, he says, word of mouth is steady. More customers won’t take more towers, so every additional customer is more profit, flat out.

Now you know where you can move if you’re a telecommuter who needs major bandwidth, and you want to enjoy the charms and laid-back, slow-talking lifestyle of the rural South. In Vernon, Robertson says, you can get a nice three-bedroom home for around $100,000.

Of course, there are lots of other low-cost towns and rural areas around the country where you can now get plenty of wireless bandwidth, so if Vernon isn’t to your taste (even though Robertson makes it sound awfully tempting), don’t worry. Go to this page and find a wireless service provider near you (or near where you would like to live). And hey, if you don’t see one that serves your area, think of that lack the way Michael Dailey did in Frederick, Maryland: as a business opportunity.

Why not start your own wireless ISP?

Most of the WISP operators we talked to while researching this article seem to use equipment supplied by Alvarion. A complete Alvarion set up runs around $21,000, including training — but not including a tower location, the T-1 access you’ll need, or the equipment you’ll need to place at each home or business you sign up. This sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t take a lot of $200 to $500 per month business clients to make this money back, especially if clients pay for the equipment needed for their end of the hookup.

Too rich for your blood? Check out another supplier, Raylink. They have the lowest-cost commercial-grade gear we’ve spotted. If you want to become a WISP, they’ll sell you a complete “WISP Out of Box” kit for a mere $1,999 if you sign up as a Raylink reseller. You’ll still need someplace to mount your antenna(s), and some means of connecting your wireless POP to the wired Internet, but if you’re already in the ISP business, you probably have all that, and if you’re not in the ISP business but are thinking about going into it, this is probably cheaper than buying enough modems (and renting enough incoming phone lines) to offer credible 56K dialup service.

There are many other wireless equipment suppliers with prices between these two extremes. There are cheap software packages available that will do all the billing and track customer usage. You run some local ads, perhaps list your service in some of the industry directories, and there you are.

You will still need to sell the service, handle technical support calls, and climb on at least some roofs to install equipment. This is the expensive part of the business — the human stuff. You will also need backup equipment; if you only have one wireless POP, chances are nearly 100% that lightning or some other disaster will eventually strike on a Friday afternoon, right after your equipment supplier is closed for the weekend, leaving all your customers without service until Tuesday or Wednesday. And if you are a sole operator, you will inevitably end up handling emergency service calls at inconvenient times, probably to the point where you’ll want to throw up your hands and quit many times, but if you’re working for yourself you won’t be able to quit unless you want to lose all the time and money you’ve invested in your venture. Some people have the stamina for this kind of business, and some don’t.

Despite the business’s pitfalls, we are seeing an explosion in the number of local wireless broadband providers similar to the one we saw in local dialup ISPs not all that many years ago. Some of these small businesses will succeed, and others won’t. The wireless ISP directory link referenced earlier in this article is littered with links to dead sites left behind by people who tried this business and failed at it.

A majority of small businesses fail, so this is not surprising. And there are signs that larger businesses are now displaying interest in WISPs, not so much in starting their own as in buying up some of the more successful small ones, which is the pattern that turned the cable TV industry from nothing but a bunch of small, local providers into a few national powerhouses.

As one small WISP owner we interviewed said, “I’ve been in this business less than a year, and I’m already starting to get buyout offers. None of them so far have been anything I want to take, but sooner or later one might come along that’s worth grabbing, and that’s the day I’ll retire.”

“Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company’s Tru64 Unix operating system.” Depressing story at news.com.