Terminally Incoherent

Here is a question for you. Have you noticed a strange, non functioning, un-encrypted ad-hoc wireless network occasionally popping up on your Wifi network list in your area? Yeah, I did too. When I first saw it at work, I thought someone in the building is messing around with at-hoc networks. Good for them. Then I noticed the same network popping up at home. Then at school, in a coffee shop and other places. I talked to my co-workers who travel a lot and they too seem to notice this strange network popping all over the country. And these networks never work and disappear as mysteriously as they appear.

To sort of gauge the magnitude of this phenomenon, I decided to search for “Free Public Wifi” on WiGLE. This is what I found:

via WiGLE - see the interactive version of this map here

Bizarre. I assume some of these hits are from genuine free public wifi networks. But I have a feeling that most are not. If you click on the link below the map, and zoom out a bit, you will be able to see that these things are also popping up all over Europe and in other places of the globe too. It seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

So I decided to investigate. After some googling, I found out a really nice writeup of this issue written by y Zaib Kaleem at wlanbook.com:

The answer to why this SSID seems to be everywhere can be blamed on Microsoft, more specifically a Windows feature called Wireless Auto Configuration (aka Wireless Zero Configuration). Wireless Auto Configuration “provides automatic configuration for the 802.11 adapters”. In an attempt to make it extremely easy to connect to WiFi networks, Wireless Auto Configuration does the following when an 802.11 adapter is enabled and starts to scan for WiFi networks. (…)

If there are no successful connections and there is an ad hoc network in the list of preferred networks that is not available, Wireless Auto Configuration configures the wireless network adapter to act as the first node in the ad hoc network (…).

At one time or another somewhere out there someone connected to a real ad-hoc WiFi network that had the SSID “Free Public WiFi”. They added this network to their preferred network list. They then traveled to a location where this WiFi SSID didn’t exist (airport, airplane, and/or hotel). They powered on their laptop with the wireless card on and Wireless Auto Configuration took over and starting searching for WiFi networks. After trying [failing to connect to any viable network in range], Windows gave up and configured WiFi card to ad hoc mode with the SSID “Free Public WiFi” (since it was a preferred network).

A second person in close proximity to the user above also has a wireless enabled laptop and is looking to connect to a WiFi network. They scan to see what is available and notice an SSID called “Free Public WiFi”….they connect to it not knowing that it is an ad hoc network. After a few seconds of wondering why they can’t surf the web they disconnect from the SSID, shrug their shoulders and move on with life. Now they have the viral SSID in their preferred list too. The next time they power on their laptop it starts to look for the “Free Public WiFi” SSID. This process is repeated in many locations across the US and world again and again. Soon this SSID is in preferred wireless networks lists everywhere spreads like a virus.

Joshua Wright likened it to a zombie outbreak in the way it has likely started with a single ad-hoc network, and now took over most of the eastern seaboard and created hot spots on the west coast, and Europe. He posted about this weird issue over a year ago, and he also did that WiGLE mapping thing. Go check out his post and compare our maps. You can clearly see how this odd infection has spread since May 07 - the difference is huge. It’s growing!

Is this wifi zombie plague dangerous? Not in and of itself, but it does create certain risk. Whenever your laptop is broadcasting the “Free Public Wifi” SSID, it is essentially revealing itself to all potential attackers. Whether or not you are actually vulnerable to an attack depends on your system setup, and security software you are running. But you clearly become a more of a target due to increased visibility. And naturally any open public wifi hotspot is arguably a dangerous place to be to begin with. This goes double for public ad-hoc networks.

Few people really use the ad-hoc functionality on a regular basis, so it is probably a good idea to configure windows not to automatically connect to them anyway. This way you both immunize yourself to this non-malicious viral wifi worm, and protect yourself from accidentally stumbling into a trap network set up by someone with malicious intent.

At some point in the past we sent out an email to the staff saying that we can assist them with file conversion services. Very often they get large data files (agings, inventory, sales receipts) in various formats. Some are plain text, some are comma/tab delimited ASCII but most are PDF. Using tools like Monarch we can relatively easily extract the data locked inside the PDF files and convert it to just about any format. The one requested most often is of course Excel.

To this day we regret not wording that email a little bit better. We still have to explain to people how this conversion process really works.

For example one guy found out that we can convert PDF files to excel from a co-worker. It just happened that he had some large, tab delimited text files that he wanted to manipulate in excel. So he came up with a brilliant plan:

1. He printed out what came out to be close to a 60 pages of data
2. He then scanned them in as PDF files
3. Naturally he was scanning them one page at a time since he didn’t know better
4. The copy machine sent the ~60 scanned PDF’s to him, one page per email
5. He then took the time to download all these files, save them, rename and reorder them
6. Finally he zipped the 60 PDF files and emailed them to me asking if I could convert them to excel

I didn’t know this story. I’m recounting it to you now because it’s silly but at the time all I knew was that I got 60 PDF files all of which essentially contained scanned images. I really didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I decided to call him up and find out what the deal was. When he recounted this process to me I had to take a break to bang my head against the wall for 5 minutes. Afterwards I called him back and explained to him how to open the tab delimited file in Excel and then click next 2 or 3 times and watch the built-in import feature does the magic.

Sigh… At least he didn’t photograph the pages on a wooden table.

Another lady was doing test counts one day. She painstakingly recorded the values of the counts using the old fashioned pen and paper method. Normally she would have to re-enter all this data into some XML file but fortunately she remembered that email we sent out. So she scanned in all these hand written notes into a PDF file and then sent them to me for conversion. It took me a while to explain to her that I didn’t really have tools to do this type of OCR. She just kept saying “But they are PDF files!”.

I don’t think she ever got it, but she eventually gave up trying to convince me to convert them. She probably figured I was lazy or something.

There seems to be something about PDF files that makes the small minded people very confused. We had another guy who kept sending word documents to the office to be “scanned in as PDF”. The secretary would then print them out, walk across the hall to the copy room, scan the printout, type in her email on the copy machine’s touch screen, go back to her desk, wait for the email, and forward it back to this guy.

They were both floored when I introduced them to PDFCreator. They absolutely loved it but it introduced a brand new problem. The Word guy would now create a document, generate a PDF and then realize he had few typos and/or mistakes in it. Fortunately he remembered we had full version of Adobe Acrobat (the one that can do touch-ups on PDF files) in the office. So he would now send us his newly converted PDF file along with the list of corrections.

I called him up and our conversation basically went like this:

Him

“Can you remove the fourth and sixth sentence in the third paragraph? This should make the whole document fit on 2 pages.”.

Me:

“Well, you see… The Adobe tool is mostly for touching up text objects. It doesn’t really re-flow the paragraphs. Btw, how do you know it will cut down the size to 2 pages?”

Him

“Oh, I did it in my word document so I can see how it will look when you do these changes.”

Me:

“Um… Wouldn’t it be easier if you just used PDFCreator to generate another PDF file out of this updated Word document?”

[long pause]

Him

“Sigh… I just thought it would be easier with the adobe thing”

I don’t know what is it about the PDF files. These folks seem to be doing ok working with Word and Excel files. But PDF files seem to have some sort of extra magical properties that induce confusion in some people.

I did some more tinkering with my blinking dash issue and I found out the following things:

1. FIXMBR + FIXBOOT did nothing. Fortunately it didn’t seem to hose my partition table so that’s good
2. Booting from the WinXP SP2 CD and choosing to repair the installation did nothing
3. Running the Windows Repair from the WinXP CD did nothing
4. Parallel install of windows on the same partition (without formating) did nothing
5. My backups seem to be ok - Captive NTFS actually works in Knoppix these days (yay)

I will try few other tips I got in the last thread but I guess I will need to format and reinstall Windows in the end. But will this work? The repair option should have theoretically fixed any corrupted files on windows side. FIXMBR and FIXBOOT should have fixed the boot entries. WTF else is there? What the hell is preventing windows from booting? Chances are that I might still have this issue after I reinstall.

In the meantime I wanted to share something very special that I have found while googling for potential solutions to my problem:

Best advice evar: “SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER”. LOL! This, ladies and gentlemen is the collective wisdom of Yahoo Answers. I swear, I haven’t read a Yahoo answer thread that didn’t make me chuckle and weep for the downfall of humanity at the same time. And I’m not even talking about technology advice - any thread on that site is LULZ-worthy to some degree.

I used to be a happy subscriber to the good old analog cable from Comcast. I would simply plug my TV into the coax cable coming out of the wall and that would give me a bit under a hundred channels. I was getting pretty much everything I wanted to watch: HBO, Comedy Central, History Channel, SciFi Channel and Cartoon Network (for Adult Swim). And I was happy. Then Comcast decided not to carry HBO over the analog connection because it was to easy to unscramble or some shit like that.

So I reluctantly bought their cable box to get the digital service. I figured that having more channels probably won’t hurt, and they even thrown in few months of free Showtime a few other premium movie channels along with the deal. And there was their On Demand service which pretty much clinched the deal. For example, you could use the service to watch most of the original HBO shows and specials the next day after they aired for free.

So I was pretty happy with the switch. One thing has always bothered me though - entering a single or two digit channel number on the remote did absolutely nothing. Most normal cable boxes, and TV remotes will usually give you a short time window to enter the number so if you for example just enter 72, and then skip a beat it will automatically tune into channel 72. Not the Comcast cable box though. If you wanted to go to channel 72 you had two choices:

1. Enter it as a full 3 digit number: 072
2. Enter 72, then press OK

WTF? Why would they do this? What is this shit? Initially I was annoyed, and I wanted to hate Comcast more, but I quickly realized that I have no more hate. It’s true, I’m not a hateful person, and I don’t hold grudges. I can only intensely hate few things at the time. And there is oh, so much things I hate these days. I mean, I’m already pretty committed to hating Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA, the Jack Thompson, Senator Stevens and bunch of other politicians that piss me off, lolcats, whoever owns the 2girls1cup domain and of course Comcast for their shitty ISP service. It’s like, I already hate them with a passion so it’s not like I could hate them more.

So I got used to it. I mean, what are you going to do. I could switch to another cable service, but that’s a lot of work and I figured that funky channel switching was one thing I could live with. Many moons have passed, and I completely forgot about the issue, habitually pressing OK after 2 digit channel numbers.

Few weeks ago I was sitting in some waiting room. I don’t remember what it was, but it was one of those places that has a magazine rack so you can read stupid shit while you are waiting. Since I had no interest in celebrity gossip, cars, body building secrets or restaurant reviews and fine dining tips, I grabbed some old crumpled up computer magazine that was sitting lonely in the corner. In fact, I’m guessing that this particular magazine was probably abandoned there by one of the patrons because it was like a 2 year old issue and there was no other tech-related magazines on the rack. I flipped around it, and flipped to the editorial section where some guy was ranting about Comcast switching their digital service software from a Microsoft box top set, to the shitty software they are using right now overnight.

Now, I never saw that old system (which just tells you how old that magazine was) but from what this guy said it was pretty sweet, at least compared to the current setup. More intuitive, with many more features and with a non retarded channel switching. The guy actually mentioned that this issue could be fixed by switching on the “auto tune” feature in the box top setup menu. No wai, I thought. I made a mental note to check it out when I get home.

Unfortunately the way my brain works is that as soon as things leave my short term memory, they go through a rigorous sorting process. Stuff like internet memes, geeky news, video game related stuff, programming tips, hax and stupid crap get placed on the high priority, fast access long therm memory sections. All the unimportant stuff like remembering to buy toilet paper, picking up clothes from the cleaners and other mundane real life shit gets filed under “Misc & Sundry” section which is conveniently located in my brain’s equivalent of the /tmp folder.

Translation for normal people: I immediately forgot about it. Geez, how do you people read this blog if you can’t follow my analogies.

Anyway, I was watching TV the other day and this random memory just popped into my mind. So I pulled up the clunky on screen menu, and found the Main Menu and went into Setup. Now you would think that the “Auto Tune” feature would be in some logical place like “Cable Box Setup” but no. It’s hidden under “Program Guide Setup” but whatever. The entry itself is very non descriptive to - it looks something like this:

Channel entry behavior: No Auto Tune

Now, unless I read about it in that old magazine I would probably not know what this thing meant. But that is not the weirdest part. What really disturbs me is why is this feature set to off by default? Initially I thought that this was just a silly quirk of this cable box - that some weekend programmer or engineer just did a half assed job and decided that adding that timeout and auto tune logic was not worth the effort. But no. The feature is there. The problem is that someone decided that it is a good idea to have the box behave differently than EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TV RECEIVER EVER MADE by default.

I know, I know - I’m complaining about a single key stroke here but come on guys. This is like basic design stuff you want to release a product that behaves in a way that your customers expect, and are used to. Most usability experts will tell you that you should strive to reduce required number of key strokes and button presses, not increase it.

I mean, the only reason why I didn’t go hunting for this feature in the menu when I got the cable box was that I did not think that someone would actually implement this feature and then leave it off by default. But I guess you just have to leave it to Comcast to do the unthinkable.

Apparently, based on my emails (all of which are in English) Google Adsense thinks I’m Chinese Japanese. I opened up an email notification sent from this very blog, and I saw the following ads on the side:

I have absolutely no clue how Google connected the comment notification emails from the thread about the UK National Lottery scams to some Asian advertisers. Maybe they are running scams too? I have no idea. I just found it funny.