Girl Geekette

zeldman.com

Jeffrey Zeldman brings a wonderful point to mind: Save the Accessibility Institute! Seen here at Jeffrey Zeldman’s website he helps spread the word of a great cause !  http://www.zeldman.com/2008/08/29/save-the-accessibility-institute/

Accessibility is one of the most under-utilized parts of a website.

I hesitate to say feature because it Accessibility should never be added onto a website as a “feature” of a website, more along the lines that a website should be itself and also BE Accessible. Confusing? Would you rather have to “make” milk Duds with chocolate surrounding caramel after you brought the chocolate and caramel home? Add a feature to the caramel? Or would you rather enjoy opening the box of milk duds and just eat them while enjoying the caramel on the inside?

Still confused? Read the page from the link and find other links from there. It would be easier than me trying to think up a cheesy analogy..

For those who are security minded, and those who are familiar with Unix, Linux and FreeBSD the port scanning program Nmap is a very well known one. Originally created to test vulnerabilities on a Local Area Network, this tool has become a must-have when testing security. Having been around for years, Nmap has always been open source and has developed quite a bit over time. Fyodor, the creator of Nmap has stayed right there along side of it through all of its changes.

Highly publicized, Nmap has gone through  public endorsements from Microsoft (actually endorsing the Insecure.org website for information on tools and knowledge for security), being used in the movie the Matrix by Trinity, and various books and articles published with Nmap being mentioned. As the co-author of Stealing the Network: How to Own the Continent , Fyodor even includes Nmap in his fictional chapter. (Read Fyodor’s chapter online) Soon, there will also be a book released on scanning a network with Nmap.

A few days ago, I found a great article on Techdirt that I really loved. "You’re Not As Secure As You Think… Except Maybe On Wireless Networks " does a great job of showing an example of how most people believe that wireless networks are insecure by nature, therefore, if the general population believes that, then they are in essence as secure as they believe they are. From all the work with wireless that I have done, I can fully agree with the way this article is presented.

Out of the box, wireless networks are extremely vulnerable and insecure. Through recent studies I have done, I can conclude that over 50% of Wireless Access Points (WAPs) are left with no security enabled - not even MAC address filtering or any type of encryption - WEP or WPA. WEP has been crackable now for a few years using programs like WEPcrack. MAC address spoofing is also easily done by using ifconfig in *nix and a simple registry change in Windows XP. Even WPA PSK has been cracked (WPA itself has not been cracked, but the PSK - private shared keys - is susceptible to brute force and has been cracked). So, when I read the article on Techdirt, I had to completely agree.