I Like Free Wifi on The Train – But Would I rather want to Pay for it?

When Thalys started to offer Wifi service in 2009 on their trains in Europe I was ecstatic as it was working great. Over the years however, their service deteriorated to something barely usable (see here, here and here) and has remained so ever since. In contrast to their service, Internet access on high speed trains in Germany has remained mostly usable over the years. Instead of satellites, Deutsche Bahn (DB) has been using a dedicated cellular network along the railway lines and has upgraded to UMTS and LTE over the years to increase capacity. So far, the service was not free so the number of users was limited and the network has remained usable. Now, however, driven by national politics who is looking for quick and simple answers, DB needs to upgrade the system and offer it for free to all passengers. A recipe for disaster?

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The DIY Retro Game Console Revisited

retro-not-assembled-smBack in December I returned from 32C3 with a DIY retro game console kit created by Voja Antonic as it promised to be fun to assemble and to study the source code. To me it was “the” hardware discovery of the congress! Apart from the prospect of playing a retro-game and to feel transported back into the 1980’s I was intrigued by the fact that the VGA graphics is not generated by a dedicated graphics unit but is instead done in software on the PIC CPU with three digital outputs that are connected to the red/green/blue lines of the VGA connector and two additional digital outputs to drive the horizontal and vertical synchronization signals for the screen. In other words, a perfect platform to get a hands-on practical view of how bits in memory can be transformed to a colorful picture on the screen.

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320 MHz of Wifi In Univiersity of Vienna’s Main Reading Hall

vienna-wifi-smWhen I recently configured a computer for Eduroam access in Vienna I took the opportunity to have a quick look at what’s in the air in Vienna University’s main reading room. It turned out that it was much more than I thought. In short, they use pretty much ALL available spectrum in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands:

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Book Review – The Billion Dollar Heist

bdhGood techno-thrillers with realistic plots and technical details are hard to come by and it seems they are mainly coming from what I would call “alternative authors” these days. Case in point are Chronos by William Hern, The Martian by Andy Weir and books by Mark Russinovich like Rouge Code that I’ve reviewed and recommended in the past. Here’s another one “The One Billion Dollar Heist” by Ben Lovejoy!

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Uninstalling Wine – Bye Bye Windows Emulation Layer

It’s been a while since I switched the final Windows based machine to Linux at my place. Admittedly there are a few things I still need Windows for but those can comfortably run in a Virtual machine on a Linux host or by using Wine, the Windows Emulation Layer for Linux. But time has come to go a step further once again.

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Eduroam – Wifi With A Certificate And Cool Roaming Features

eduroamBack in December 2015 I found my first public Wifi network at 32C3 that used a certificate instead of a common password, not so much for user authentication but for assigning an individual ciphering key to each device. Especially at a hacker conference that’s a plus as normal WPA encryption uses the same passphrase for everyone and hence attackers can decrypt the Wifi traffic of others if they know the common passphrase and have intercepted the authentication dialog. When recently being asked to configure a computer for Eduroam access, an international Wifi network at universities (for a world map see here), I found yet another flavor of Wifi certificate use that is highly interesting.

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Bad Internet Connectivity Makes Me Leave The Turkish Airlines Lounge

The Turkish Airlines Lounge in Istanbul is by all means one of the coolest places to stay at any airport around the globe. Well at least it was so far.  Apart from a nice interior one thing that is obviously absolutely crucial to me and many other business travelers is good Internet connectivity. And this is more and more difficult to get in that lounge.

While there is Wi-Fi in the lounge, OpenVPN and IPSec connectivity is blocked. No idea why but I’m probably not the only business traveler who is more than unhappy about this. At least I can use an SSH tunnel VPN that they (forgot?) to block to get my data safely through the network. Another option that has worked so far in the lounge is to tether my PC via a mobile device and one of the cellular networks there to the Internet. Unfortunately both times I’ve been there recently, Turkcell and Vodafone Turkey failed miserably.

Outside the lounge at the gates, both networks worked well so I decided to leave. Perhaps one of the companies involved in this cares and does something about the situation next time. Would be nice…