Wireless connections

Accountable · Post by **Accountable** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 5:22 pm

You told me he would be okay with me sending those! That's the last time I strip for you!

WonderWendy3 · Post by **WonderWendy3** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 5:24 pm

:wah::wah::wah:

If you have it on your hard-drive and not a networked program Peachy, he shouldn't be able to...but I am not a computer technician...only play one at work when the guys aren't looking!:wah:

but in the event I'm wrong....could you kindly remove the one of my boobs??

k..thanks!!

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 5:44 pm

Wired or wireless makes absolutely no difference. What matters is the drive and folder sharing permissions. If Person X can physically touch your machine ever, then for the rest of history he can (if he changed the permissions) look at your files from anywhere in the world, much less over the hard wire or the wireless link inside the house. Permanent physical isolation of a computer is the first essential if you want security of any kind. Auditing a computer to see if it's had the shares changed already is beyond your competence.

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:11 pm

My son is a wizz with computers and it dosent matter if I am wireless or not he can get into my computer:( I have warned him he better not though :yh_beatup

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:16 pm

I have a password on mine that I have to put in before I can get into it

Accountable · Post by **Accountable** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:29 pm

Like Spot said, makes no diff.

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:30 pm

Dosent matter Carol they can still get into it:(

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:35 pm

kayleneaussie;780994 wrote: Dosent matter Carol they can still get into it:(Who can......you mean hackers?But people in the house cant can they unless they know the password???

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:50 pm

Yes people in the house can Carol if they know what they are doing

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 6:51 pm

Carolly;780996 wrote: Who can......you mean hackers?But people in the house cant can they unless they know the password???

It depends on what you've put a password on. Is is the BIOS? Is it every administrator account? Are any remote access services running?

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:00 pm

spot;781000 wrote: It depends on what you've put a password on. Is is the BIOS? Is it every administrator account? Are any remote access services running?
Gawd knows Spot

....Im useless.....all I know is I have one and so far it has kept nosey people that has access to this pc but dosent use it as they have their own away from entering it.

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:06 pm

Ah. One of those passwords. Yes, I know that sort.

You're relying on trust that they won't want to find out what you're storing, or ignorance that they don't know how to look. What you have is dissuasion but it's not prohibition.

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:08 pm

spot;781004 wrote: Ah. One of those passwords. Yes, I know that sort.

You're relying on trust that they won't want to find out what you're storing, or ignorance that they don't know how to look. What you have is dissuasion but it's not prohibition.
So Spot how would they find it out???

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:13 pm

They have to be very computer Literate Carol, if they are not dont worry:)

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:15 pm

kayleneaussie;781006 wrote: They have to be very computer Literate Carol, if they are not dont worry:)Fanks mate phew :rolleyes:;)

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:22 pm

Carolly;781005 wrote: So Spot how would they find it out???

The cheap answer is a £10 dongle they'd plug into your keyboard connector that would capture all your keystrokes for a day. The first dozen or so would be your password.

Then, when you were out shopping, they'd log in with that password and change the share permissions of your personal documents folder to allow them to monitor all your files from their headquarters in Dagenham. And they'd add an invisible program that kept on catching your keystrokes and emailed them once a day to a secret admirer in Venezuela. And they'd take the dongle off so you'd not catch sight of it accidentally in a few weeks. Besides, it's still worth £10.

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:29 pm

spot;781008 wrote: The cheap answer is a £10 dongle they'd plug into your keyboard connector that would capture all your keystrokes for a day. The first dozen or so would be your password.

Then, when you were out shopping, they'd log in with that password and change the share permissions of your personal documents folder to allow them to monitor all your files from their headquarters in Dagenham. And they'd add an invisible program that kept on catching your keystrokes and emailed them once a day to a secret admirer in Venezuela. And they'd take the dongle off so you'd not catch sight of it accidentally in a few weeks. Besides, it's still worth £10.

Whats a dongle fgs and what does it look like?Surely I would see it?

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:30 pm

Carolly;781009 wrote: Whats a dongle fgs and what does it look like?

yea I wanted to know that too Carol:yh_rotfl

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:35 pm

Ya cant get anything like that in Aussie. You need to download a remote access programme one onto the computer that u want to look into (The Server) and one onto the computer u will be using to watch wat they do (The Client) You will be able to see everything they do and they wont even know.. u can even control there computer whilst they are on it.

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:40 pm

Carolly;781009 wrote: Whats a dongle fgs and what does it look like?Surely I would see it?

You're sure you'd notice it on the one day it was there? Round the back of the computer in among all those wires?

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:42 pm

Dont think they sell those over here Spot, so Carol you will have to move to Australia:)

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:43 pm

spot;781018 wrote:

You're sure you'd notice it on the one day it was there? Round the back of the computer in among all those wires?
Would on a laptop surely Spot .....and you say it has to be actually plugged into it?

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:43 pm

Carolly;781022 wrote: Would on a laptop surely Spot .....and you say it has to be actually plugged into it?

Yes, you would on a laptop, you'd not mentioned it was a laptop. I'd do it differently on a laptop.

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:45 pm

Just found this..........................

dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer, often to authenticate a piece of software. When the dongle is not present, the software runs in a restricted mode or refuses to run. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy prevention or digital rights management because it is much harder to copy the dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Vendors of software protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device in their written literature. In day-to-day use however, the jargon word "dongle" is much more commonly used.

The term has been somewhat generalized to describe specialized connectors that convert one type of port to another, for example an 8P8C modular jack that plugs into the edge connector on some kinds of PC card Ethernet adaptors, as well as small devices such as USB flash drives or wireless networking adapters. In addition, author Douglas Adams, in a 1990s column for the US edition of MacWorld magazine, used the term "little dongly things" to describe plug converters necessary for adapting US power cables to international plugs.[1] These usages are not universally accepted.

Software protection dongles are typically used with very expensive packages and vertical market software, such as CAD/CAM software, MICROS Systems hospitality and special retail software, Digital Audio Workstation applications and some translation memory packages. The vast majority of printing and prepress software, such as CtP work flows, require dongles. Efforts to introduce dongle copy prevention in the mainstream software market were generally met with stiff resistance from users. Despite being hardware, dongles are not a complete solution to the trusted client problem.

Some times, in cases such as prepress and printing software, the dongle is encoded with a specific, per-user licence key, which determines which software features are enabled in the target application. This is a form of tightly controlled licensing, which allows the vendor to engage in vendor lock-in and charge more than they would otherwise for the product. An example of this practice is seen in the way Creo licences Prinergy to customers: When a computer-to-plate output device is sold to a customer, Prinergy's own licence cost is provided separately to the customer, and the base price contains little more than the required licences to output work to the device. In order to access the advertised features in the application, the customer must pay a significant amount of money for a special dongle.

Well-known software protection dongle manufacturers include Matrix (Matrix Dongle) Matrix Software License Protection System, SafeNet (better known as Rainbow), ROCKEY4ND Dongle Software Professional Protection,Aladdin, Microcosm Ltd (Dinkey Dongles), WIBU-SYSTEMS, SG-Lock, UniKey (or SecuTech), Senselock (or Sense), and MARX (CRYPTO-BOX) and in the digital audio world, some versions of Pro Tools and many plugins use the Pace iLok Smart Key USB dongles.

Contents [hide]

1 History

2 Problems with software protection dongles

3 Game consoles

4 Organizations Manufacturing Dongles

5 References

6 See also

7 External links

[edit] History

The word dongle has been used as a placeholder name since the 1970s. Its origin is unknown. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, says it is "probably [an] arbitrary coinage." Claims that it was derived from the name "Don Gall" are an urban myth popularized by a 1992 advertisement for Rainbow Technologies, now SafeNet, a dongle vendor from the U.S.

Dongle as the name of a device was used well before 1980 within the telecom industry to refer to BNC cable joiners of either gender.

WORDCRAFT was the first program to use a software protection dongle, in 1980. Its dongle was a simple passive device that supplied data to the pins of a Commodore PET's external cassette port in a pre-determined manner. This arrangement was made possible because the PET cassette port supplied both power and data connections through a proprietary edge connector. It did, however, make the cassette port unusable for its intended purpose.

The two cubic inch (33 cm³) resin-potted first generation devices were called "dongles" by the inventor as there was no other suitable term to hand on the day. The distributor, Dataview Ltd., then based in Colchester, UK, then went on to produce a derivative dongle which became their core business.

Dongles rapidly evolved into active devices that contained a serial transceiver (UART) and even a microprocessor to handle transactions with the host. Later versions adopted the USB interface in preference to the serial or parallel interface. Currently, due to the maturity and advancement of USB technology, USB interface is gradually taking a dominating position.

It is interesting to note that modern smart cards present the same features set as modern dongles. Given this, the dongle market may be overtaken by smart cards as smart cards are more secure and powerful by design than traditional MCU based dongles. Some dongle vendors are producing one-chip dongle, which means it combines the smart card and the smart card reader in the same chip. Such structure makes smart card dongle easy and stable.

[edit] Problems with software protection dongles

There is the potential for weaknesses in the implementation of the protocol between the dongle and the copy-controlled software. It requires considerable cunning to implement this in a fashion that is not easy to crack. For example, naive implementations might simply define a function to check for the dongle, returning "true" or "false" accordingly, reducing the prevention scheme to a single bit value at one point in the program.

Modern dongles include built-in strong encryption and use fabrication techniques designed to thwart reverse engineering. Typical dongles also now contain non-volatile memory — key parts of the software may actually be stored and executed on the dongle. Thus dongles evolved and have become secure cryptoprocessors that execute inaccessible program instructions that may be input to the cryptoprocessor only in encrypted form. The original secure cryptoprocessor was designed for copy protection of personal computer software (see US Patent 4,168,396, Sept 18, 1979) to provide more security than dongles could then provide. See also bus encryption.

However, security researchers warn that dongles still do not solve the trusted client problem: that if you give a user the cryptographic ciphertext, the algorithm and the key, your cipher is likely to be breakable, even with the algorithm and key encoded in hardware.[2]

Another problem is that if the need for the dongle is bypassed, the counterfeit version of the program is then seen to be superior to the legitimate original.

Hardware cloning is also a lethal threat to traditional dongles. To thwart this, some dongle vendors adopted smart card product, which is widely used in extremely rigid security requirement environments such as military and banking, in their dongle products.

Dongle driver brings problems for end-users. Most of developers or software vendors want to get rid of dongle driver headache. There are some driverless dongles in the market, which make the protection easy for both software vendor and end-users.

A more innovative modern dongle is designed with a code porting mechanism, meaning you can transfer part of your important program code or license enforcement into a secure hardware environment (such as in a smart card OS, mentioned above). An ISV can port hundreds and thousands of lines of important computer program code into the dongle.

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:47 pm

So Spot would you have to be computer Literate to do that or would it be easy for any person......just curious

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:50 pm

spot;781023 wrote: Yes, you would on a laptop, you'd not mentioned it was a laptop. I'd do it differently on a laptop.How Spot??

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:50 pm

That's what they're for. Plugging in on the outside of a computer to influence either what can run or what gets watched.

The one I showed is bulky as you said. You can spend £50 and get one the size of a fingernail that fits under the keys, actually inside the casing, and it takes two minutes to install and remove either in a laptop or on a desktop. It really can be made absolutely undetectable if that's important. The only way to stop it is not to let anyone have physical access to the computer.

Post by **spot** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:52 pm

kayleneaussie;781028 wrote: So Spot would you have to be computer Literate to do that or would it be easy for any person......just curious

It's easy for anyone with a small screwdriver who's practiced it first. It's more can you use a screwdriver rather than do you know what a computer is.

kayleneaussie · Post by **kayleneaussie** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:55 pm

spot;781032 wrote: It's easy for anyone with a small screwdriver who's practiced it first. It's more can you use a screwdriver rather than do you know what a computer is.

Oh ok Thanks:)

Carolly · Post by **Carolly** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:57 pm

Very interesting Spot......thankyou.

Post by **spot** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:01 am

fuzzy butt;781054 wrote: Spot you underestimate me ..................I become very PC literate when I wan to . *smirk*

What?????

Where on earth did that come from?

You asked a sensible question in the OP, I posted you a useful single reply at #5 which made not the least estimation of your PC literacy, and that's the sole exchange we had in the thread! And then you accuse me of talking down to you? I don't talk down to anyone, it's not in my nature.

There's been a few of these questions about security, I think I'd better write a thread started about just that. I'll go away and think about it.

Chezzie · Post by **Chezzie** » Fri Feb 22, 2008 8:00 am

Did you also know that you can obtain software that lets you reset someones passwords.

Active@ Boot Disk 3.0

Active@ Boot Disk is a bootable CD that gives you a lightweight Windows VISTA (WinPE 2.0) environment with disk recovery, data recovery, password resetting, data erasure and network access tools.

Im sure their are others too.

No pc is 100% safe im afraid:(

hey fuzzy.......what u hiding then eh???:D:D:sneaky:

Post by **spot** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 3:15 am

fuzzy butt;781559 wrote: Oh stop getting your nickers in a knot boy.

YOu said this - "Auditing a computer to see if it's had the shares changed already is beyond your competence." and after the other posts, that's simply what I posted. You menapausal or something?:wah::wah: I thought you'd be used to my brashness by now .

Let me change the sentence to something equally true and less offensive then - auditing a computer to see if it's had the shares changed already is beyond my competence too. I can have a go at it but I'd never feel certain that I'd nailed every possibility. I've maintained security for networks in the past and believe me, it's an arcane exercise and anyone who says he's got it tight enough is kidding himself. There's always the question of "what does he know that I don't know", with the complication that you've no idea who "he" is. If anyone asked me to tighten their security I'd ideally want to start by re-installing everything from scratch myself.

I have two things here which may or may not spark a response - one is a guide on securing your computer and the other's an observation.

The guide, then. Guidance for Securing Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. I have read it. I recommend it. I'll help anyone who has any questions about what it says, all it takes is copy the bit that puzzles you to a thread here and I'll explain it.

The observation. I can see from the access records at ForumGarden that lots of users have a particularly nasty piece of adware on their computers called FunWebProducts. People have slow computers that behave badly? That product would have that effect just on its own. Would it be a breach of confidence if I listed who's infected with it or would you rather all just follow the instructions on your own?