The simplest wireless guest solution

In this article I’ll try to present the simplest and cheapest solution available to any free Wi-Fi provider to offer encryption. This is based on Scenario 1 in my article Wireless Guest Networks

The scenario (summary)

• The provider is a coffee shop, let’s call them “Coffee ‘N WiFi”
• The provider needs a cheap and simple solution.
• Low traffic scenario

The solution

Encrypt your Wi-Fi with WPA2-PSK and publish the key. All you need to do is to make a plaque saying: “Internet! Network: CoffeNwifi; Password: Cappuccino”

Pros

• Easy to set up
• No need for expensive equipment
• Available today

Cons

• Doesn’t scale very well
• Users need to know the password
• Still possible to crack if you intercept the handshake

Summary

The PSK solution is simple and it does increase security one notch. Unfortunately it does not scale, so next week I’m going to present the second solution. That one is going to invent something new and would require vendor adaptation before it can be used.

Wireless guest networks

Ever since the Google “Wi-Fi Scandal” the “outrage” of certain individuals has struck me. Or more correctly the fact that privacy advocates are screaming bloody murder; while it seems nobody noticed that anyone with half a brain and a laptop could do the exact same thing. As long as you use an unencrypted network, everyone can just sniff out all of your communication right over the air in clear text. If you use unencrypted Wi-Fi at home you are asking to get hacked, plain and simple.

Ten I got hit by a bomb of a revelation hit me, guest and public access networks. I’ve thought about the solution for a very long time. This is going to be the first post in a series of articles discussing the various solutions to the problem and their strengths/weaknesses. This first article is going to present a few use cases, the following articles are going to present the solution to each of the scenarios presented.

Scenario 1

A small coffee shop wants to offer free Wi-Fi to attract customers. They do not have a significant revenue so they can’t afford an expensive solution.

Scenario 2

A public access network provider. They need to connect users securely, no need for user identification.

Scenario 3

Wi-Fi hotspot provider. Needs per-user authentication but also authentication-free access for user registration.

I’ll do my best to type up these articles before I start posting, and post them about a week apart.

Creationism again

I recently got this comment:
"Evolution is not a fact, it is a delusion brought on by atheists who are desperate to grasp onto any crackpot explanation for how man came to be."

And the followup:

"A Christian who believes in macro evolution is as deluded as a satanist who goes to church every Sunday. As a Christian I don't claim to know exactly how old the universe is, but I do know God created man as he is today, not as a microorganism that slowly and randomly 'evolved'. This is the real world bro, not some Pokemon knockoff."

Let me see: Pokémon created by Satoshi Tajiri for Nintendo in 1996.
On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin in 1859

There's a 137 year gap there that the commenter can't explain because he/she pulled this comment out of their butts in an attempt to ridicule evolution, but only managed to show the lack of real arguments to present.

As for the use of "randomly 'evolved'" that pretty much tells me this person has no understating of natural selection. Natural selection is not random. Evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. Using the word random to describe evolution just exposes your lack of understanding. The process is not random at all, there is randomness involved; just as in nuclear fission, but the process is in no way random. 

To enforce my point, I am going to take the example of the card game poker. In poker you get a number of random cards. Depending on what type of game you play you can choose to keep or discard certain cards. We can all agree that there is randomness involved, but for some reason the same professional players still rise to the top over and over again. So we are no left with the big question, if poker is truly a game of chance, why are the same group of people always winning? We are therefore forced to conclude that poker is not a random game even thou there is an element of randomness in it. 

About evolution

I am going to do another of my short two-paragraph rants, this time about evolution and creationism. I'll start out by saying that evolution is a biological process; anyone who writes an argument that is not about biology, do not understand evolution. Secondly origins of life is abiogenesis, not evolution. Thirdly the second law of thermodynamics say that "[I]n a closed system, you can't finish any real physical process with as much useful energy as you had to start with[.]" and "Entropy in a closed system can never decrease."[1] Creationists love to quote this on, but they fail to notice that the earth is not a closed system. Look out of your window, do you see that big ball of Hydrogen and Helium plasma? That is an outside energy source. The second law of thermodynamics does allow for local decreases of entropy within a system; an AC unit is a perfect example. Every solar storm that doesn't hit any thing will increase the entropy of the the universe as a whole. However any energy or radiation that hits earth will add energy to the localized system called earth effectively destroying that argument.
To sum up, if I in any argument tell you that "that has nothing to do with evolution" I really mean it, and I am not going to debate you on that subject unless you add the proper label to it. And the "biology is a subset of chemistry which in turn is a subset of physics" argument is stupid too. Just look at this:

A = {1,2,3} B = {5,6,7} C = {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}

It is true that both A and B are both subsets of C, but there is no intersection between A and B so you can't use B to make a proof on A and any thing that applies to B may not necessarily apply to the entirety of C. QED.
[1] http://www.panspermia.org/seconlaw.htm

Religious neutrality

I've had a discussion lately on separation of church and state. And for some reason, theists (mostly Christians) seems to be having problems seeing the difference between an atheistic state religion and "no state religion" also known as "neutral state religion". Because they see atheism as a religion; atheism is not a religion, just as "not smoking" is a habit, and not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Atheism literally translates to "no god". This includes agnostics by the way, because they have no God. Now, remember I am talking about religious neutrality here, a religiously neutral state has to be agnostic by definition, because acknowledging a God, any god, is taking sides, and breaching neutrality.

Just a little note at the end. In a neutral state, the state do not care if "God hates fags", if someone want to smoke those horrible things and poison themselves, they should be free to do so. Allowing cigarettes is not going to infringe on your rights not to smoke them, so why are you complaining anyway? And by the way, pun intended, and it applies to both interpretations.

Richard Feynman

I'm making a habit out of posting youtube videos, but I really don't care. Here are some videos of Richard Feynman on science.

Stupid arguments #1

The other day I got the following argument thrown at me from a creationist: "Newton didn't believe in evolution"
Why is this wrong on so manny levels, and why is this argument stupid? Lets's start off:
Sir Isaac Newton, 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 (Gregorian calendar)
Charles Robert Darwin, 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882
Darwin's Book: "On the Origin of Species" where evolution were introduced. - 1959
Isaac Newton died 132 years before the theory of evolution were even coined, did you really think nobody would realize that? Or is it a habit of young earth creationists to ignore documented death dates in favor of imaginary ideas.
One phrase comes to mind: "Shame on you"

Godwin's law

I see a lot of "pulling Godwin's law" in my future, so I'm going to do some clarification on exactly what that means.
When I pull Godwin's law that means that somebody used the argument "The Nazis (...) so therefore (...)" Same goes for Hitler, Al Qaeda, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Mao etc. I'll even extend it to "Jesus". And the argument I make is this: Just because someone liked or disliked something does not mean that thing is automatically good or bad; and if you make such an absurd claim you automatically lost your credibility in the conversation.
When I pull a Reverse Godwins law, that means I'm using a Godwin's Law analogy to show that your argument is absurd; usually by injecting the Nazi's or Hitler into your argument. For instance: Hitler probably won a lot of debates; killing jews is still bad and winning a debate is not evidence of truth.

If you want to prove creation by God, explain this.

This goes for Intelligent design, and creationist.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9136200/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/chimp-genetic-code-opens-human-frontiers/
The only catch is: You need to do it without using the argument "Well, that's how God crated it", that argument is not scientific, I'll leave the explanation of why to Richard Feynman.


Look at the part when he says: so vague it can predict anything.

If you are of the people who believe God designed the laws of nature and set off the big bang, you probably do believe in evolution, and therefore this challenge do not apply to you.

Presenting: Vikens law of legal exploitations

I am not a politician, and I do not study law, but still I am going to present you with a law or observation.
This is not a law in a legal system, nor a scientific law, this is a observational pattern; I'll go as far as to call it a theorem. However what it does describe is a pattern in a legal system, and it goes like this:
If a law can be demonstrated to be exploitable for malicious intent; that exploit will, at some point, almost certainly be used for malicious intents.
Now let me explain this.

Here's the logic, and if anyone could help me formulate this as formal logic i would be very thankful.

a.1: Most publicly traded corporations have an obligation to their shareholders to make as much a profit as they possibly can.
a.2: A subset of all corporations will use any non-illegal means available to them to maximize their profits.
b.1: Equal competition makes for lower prices and lower profits and visa versa.
b.2: Fewer competitors means less equal competition.
b.3: Decreased equality in competition means higher prices and therefore profits.
c: Taking a share of a competitors profit margin is a practically free profit increase, and increases competition inequality.
d: A Judicial process is in itself a burden and may kill a weaker party before its completion.
e: Use of an unintended consequence of a law is not illegal.

'a' means that corporations are generally, but not always inherently greedy and a subset may use any non-illegal means to maximize it.
'b' Implies that lower competitive equality is beneficial with regards to 'a'
'c' Implies that a scenario beneficiary towards 'b.2', 'b.3' and 'a' can be achieved my using means commonly associated with intellectual property.
'd' States that if a strong party sue a small party, no matter what the ultimate legal outcome might be, the small party may go bankrupt before the process has been completed and may be beneficiary towards 'b.2'.
'e' States that a member of the subset described in 'a.2' may use a unintended consequence or ambiguity to maximize their profits in ways including but not limited to 'c' and 'd'

The reason I wrote this law down is to formalize why a lawmaker confronted with a scenario; in which a proposed law is exploited, with malicious intent beyond the scope of the original intent of the law; should not be able to get away with the answer "That's not the intention of the law, that is never going to happen". It is very likely to happen. So don't let anyone get away with it; if they actively avoid addressing the problem, it is a possibility that the law was written with this intent in mind, in order to exploit that exact ambiguity and/or loophole.

This is a work in progress so any comments are welcome.