Posts Tagged Wireless

Surprising Victory for Common Sense

Posted by JJT in Blogging on March 25, 2008

Carol was kind enough to send me a link to “Del. Myers proposes jail time for using neighbor’s unsecured wi-fi“.  Apparently, one of Maryland’s less enlightened State Delegates, LeRoy Meyers of Washington and Allegany Counties, proposed legislation making it a crime to make use of an unsecured wireless network without permission.  Fortunately, the proposed bill died in committee based on the recommendation of the Public Defender’s office.

I could go on about the problem, but ars technica hit all the good points.  I just find it hard to believe that using an open wireless network without permission is so bad, especially when the network is wide open and named the default for that vendor’s wireless device.

Thanks for making Maryland stand out with such a ridiculous proposal, Delegate Meyers!

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Avoiding the Pain of the Verizon Actiontec DSL Modem/Router

Posted by JJT in Blogging on February 27, 2008

The Verizon Actiontec GT704WG Wireless  Gateway pictured below is an incredibly engineered piece of FAIL.

actiontecgt704wg_vz200.jpg

If Verizon attempts to send you this for your DSL service, run away from this piece of hardware as fast as you can.  There are two major problems I have with this hardware:

  • it uses Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) for securing the wireless network;
  • the  key used on a WEP-secured wireless network is  hexadecimal string of the letters A-F and the numbers 0-9; and
  • did I mention it uses WEP?

Resetting the router to its factory defaults is pretty easy, but I had the hardest problem getting devices connected to the gateway to connect to the Internet.  The gateway would easily connect once it was configured with the correct Verizon account information, but the devices connected wirelessly were stuck in an endless loop of having to activate the DSL service.  Essentially, the laptop I was connecting would continually be prompted to download software it neither needed nor could use.  I also did not need to activate the service since it has been active for some time, and I had no need for account setup.

I was able to find a resource via Google that walked through how to avoid this problem with machines that ran neither Windows nor OS X.   Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Ben’s Drivel.  Here are the directions on how to get out of this stupid loop.

  1. Ensure your laptop is connected to the gateway.
  2. Open an Internet browser, and enter the following address into the address bar:

    http://192.168.1.1/verizon/redirect

  3. You should be prompted to enter the administrative username and password for your gateway.  Enter those credentials.
  4. A new page should appear with a button that says ON.  It should also have some verbiage concerning its redirection.
  5. Click on the ON button, and it should change to OFF.  Save this setting.
  6. Using your Internet browser, surf to Google.com.  It should now load without the annoying “Activate DSL” site appearing.  Enjoy the Internets!

Hopefully, these instructions will come in handy for someone in the future.

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