Amazon Kindle & Mixed Wi-Fi Security

Recently, my Father-in-law bought a Kindle for my Mother-in-law. He brought it home, read the instructions, and tried to get it it set-up to use his wireless network at home. He logged into his wireless router and got the security key, but when he entered it on the Kindle and tried to connect it would fail. He tried several times, even manually configuring the connection, but nothing seemed to work.

Wanting to determine if he had a defective unit (unlikely), he took it to a local McDonalds and tried connecting to the free Wi-Fi provided by AT&T… Success!

At this point, he called me to help him figure out what he was doing wrong since it seemed to work everywhere but home. I walked him through a few things over the phone before logging into his computer remotely and looking at the settings on the wireless router myself. The settings on his fairly new Belkin router were configured to use WPA/WPA2 for security. I had him try to manually set the Kindle to use first WPA2 and then WPA without success.

At this point, I changed the security settings on the router to be just WPA2 (not WPA/WPA2) and then had him try connecting the Kindle again… Bingo!

Apparently, the Kindle doesn’t like wireless routers that are set to use mixed mode Wi-Fi security settings. Since the only other device that he has to connect to his wireless network is his laptop, we can safely use the latest/strongest setting of WPA2 without worrying about older devices not being able to connect.

Hope this helps someone else out there!

Securing Corporate data on your laptop?

There has been a lot of talk lately about traveling internationally and potentially having your laptop confiscated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security without cause or suspicion (example). They can also share the contents of your laptop with any other agency they like, without consent, and without a guarantee that they won’t further distribute or retain that data.

I’ll focus here on the business implications of this and not tread into the murkier issues of personal privacy. Suffice it to say, if you’ve done something illegal, you reap what you sow (but there should at least be reasonable suspicion).

Almost all business users have corporate documents on their machine (sales presentations, financials, etc.) unless your using a Content Management System (CMS) like SharePoint. What would happen if your upcoming Quarterly Earnings Report was on your confiscated machine and it got leaked early?

An easy way to protect this data is with encryption. Nobody can look at the data without your consent because you would need to provide the password to decrypt the file. Problem is, they can still see the files and force you to decrypt them.

Enter TrueCrypt. With TrueCrypt, you can create an encrypted volume that is nothing more than a file on your machine that you can name whatever you want (“foo.dat” for instance). After creating the encrypted volume, you can mount it as a regular drive letter on your machine and any program can access it as usual. All encryption/decryption happens on the fly in memory, so the data is constantly protected and leaves no traces in temporary files anywhere.

If you are really paranoid, you can create a hidden partition within the encrypted volume. That way, even if you are forced to reveal your password to the main volume (where you stored some innocent/random files) they won’t be able to tell that there was an inner encrypted volume that had the real data on it.

Of course, if you have a laptop, you need to dismount any TrueCrypt volumes before suspending/hibernating or else anyone who forces you to unlock your computer will immediately have access to the encrypted volumes.

Safe Travels!

SQL Server Management Studio Tip

Recently, Sara Ford outlined a tip on her blog about a registry hack that enables vertical column guides within the Visual Studio Editors. This is one feature that my favorite text editor (Notepad++) has had for a long time and something that I have missed when working within Visual Studio.

After using this for a few hours in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and then using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), I wondered if it would be possible to enable this option for SSMS's editor(s)?

After digging through the registry, I found a registry path the looked an awful lot like the Visual Studio path. I closed down SSMS, added the proper registry key, and then opened SSMS, and...

Presto! I now have the vertical column guides! Here are the instructions...

WARNING: This tip modifies your registry. Please ensure that you have a backup before proceeding in the event that Murphy's law kicks in!

1. Open the Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Shell\TextEditor
3. Add a new String value named "Guides"
4. Set the value to "RGB(r,g,b),c1,...,c13" using the format described in Sara's blog.

Enjoy!