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Sharing The WiFi Love

I live in a fairly secluded area and never bothered to encrypt my WiFi AP. I am just too far from anyone else to need to go through the hassle… Or so I thought. My Internet performance has been so degraded lately that I can barely work.

I have further had to reset the AP a few times in the past few days.

I noticed today that when I was looking at available wireless networks, another WiFi signal was coming into my house. I decided if I can see another AP then other people can see mine. A bit of sleuthing turned up two people on my access point who were sucking down my bandwidth.

I never had to deal with WEP keys till today. In my office MIS has been nice enough to deal with this in my office. Well come to think of it I have had to set WEP keys on a number of WiFi phones.

In hindsight, I was pretty lucky. I never even changed my admin password so I am glad I didn’t get my AP hacked.

This shows me that even in rural Connecticut where houses are spaced far apart the ability for concepts like mesh networking can take place. Of course if such a network were to be built we would need to ensure one or two users don’t suck up all the bandwidth like what just happened to me.

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Lenovo Gets Busy

The biggest change we see here at TMC due to the Lenovo acquisition of the IBM Computer Division is that ThinkPads sent for repair now go to China and back. This has the unfortunate side effect in our case of leading to a missorted package and a laptop that was returned to us in malfunctioning condition. Here is the information provided recently by our shipper:

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More Blackberry Woes

The worst case scenario for RIM and NTP is for RIM to lose business as NTP is incented to see as many Blackberries as possible sold. Why? Because of course NTP gets a cut of all future Blackberry sales. Or at least that is how it looks to be shaping up. Where the problem lies is in how absolutely long it is taking for RIM to settle this mess.

It is getting so bad that major analysts are suggesting their clients steer clear of Blackberry. It is hard to believe the two companies won’t settle soon and by the same token, the sooner Blackberry would have settled the less they would have had to pay and more importantly the sooner they could focus on new devices and strategies to ward of the growing army of new competitors.

It seems as if the controversy may never end and this article details the major consequences Blackberry and NTP face if this doesn’t get behind us soon.

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Telecom Tax Refund

Companies such as Convergys, a very large contact center outsourcer and telecom billing company will receive a six million dollar refund due to the fact that a telecom tax of 3% has been ruled unlawful. A staggering $9 billion dollars are owed consumers who have already paid these taxes. The tax exemption covers VoIP, cell phones and one-third of long-distance calls.

According to this article, on Friday, a court in Washington, D.C., became the third federal appeals court since May to void the tax. Two other federal appeals courts, covering seven states, have ruled the tax unlawful, and cases are pending elsewhere in the nation's 13 appeals courts. In all, nine federal courts have ruled that a 3% federal tax doesn't apply to phone calls that are priced only by how long a person talks - not by how far the call travels.

The challenge is collecting the refund as a person entitled to a $50 refund would have to fill out forms a dozen times to get the three years' worth of refunds permitted under tax law. Collecting records and preparing the form would take about seven hours.

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