Yaffle's Corner

The very first entry in this blog was this one, where I described a means of easily generating a 63 digit hex key by using a phrase from a favourite book.

Yesterday afternoon, a message with a link to this article dropped into my mail box.

For just a very few dollars you can now stress test the security of any WPA or WPA2 secured wireless network. My guess is that an awful lot of networks will be vulnerable to being cracked this way, so its definitely time for one of those 63 hex digit keys if the security of your wireless network is in any way important.

So you have this mobile phone. Its an expensive piece of kit and a pain to replace. Worse, these days we have all sorts of information on them that we wouldn't want to fall into the wrong hands.

If you're very organised, i.e. you kept the packing box it was sent in, then you can phone your mobile phone company, and have them block your account and the IMEI. Blocking the IMEI takes a day or two to propagate around all the UK phone providers, but after that, the phone is totally useless to anyone who may have taken it, no matter what SIM they put in it. The phone will also be useless to you should you get it back. Surely, there is a better way?

If you have a phone that is smart enough, then there certainly is. This morning I read this review of Track and Protect which runs on many Symbian 3rd Edition phones and all Symbian 5th Edition phones. I am not going to review this software, although its the one I've chosen, so read the linked article if you're interested.

When I tweeted that I'd found some suitable software, a friend of mine asked me about WaveSecure. This latter software has similar functionality to Track and Protect and is available for Symbian, Android and others. It differs in two respects and these are charging model and what happens if a thief inserts an alien (i.e. not yours) SIM in the phone.

Track and Protect can be downloaded for free. This will give you some minimum protection. To get the best use of it, when your phone is lost/stolen, you'll want the ability to send it remote commands, or try and locate it. This is done by sending silent SMS commands to your phone. These SMS messages use up a pre-purchased credit. I purchased 15 credits for 4.99 euros (£4.31 at today's exchange rate). I won't have to purchase any more credits until I've used up the ones I've purchased. With Wave Secure, you pay £19.90 for the software, including the first year's subscription, and then you pay again next year, so this is rather like a standard insurance contract. I prefer the Track and Protect charging method which is why I chose this software.

The other difference is what happens if someone inserts an alien SIM into your phone. With Track and Protect, the phone immediately notifies the track and protect server, which can then allow you to continue sending remote commands to the phone. Wave Secure just locks the phone at that point, meaning the phone is useless to the thief, but also to you.

So you pays your money and you makes your choice, but either way, they can't make lots of phone calls at my expense and, given I have my Twitter, Skype and Email available on my phone, they won't be able to pretend to be me either.

You may have read in the press the arguments that have been occurring between Fring and Skype. You can find The Register's article on the subject here.

In any event, this has (largely) rendered my copy of Fring useless as what I use it for mainly these days is to make the odd Skype call - after all - I have a good balance left which I don't wish to lose.

Fortunately, I read on All About Symbian that a new version of Skype for Symbian had been released which had a rather lower memory footprint, so this lunch time I downloaded it.

It appears to be not bad, the call quality is good and I tested it against a switchboard. Fring had only recently included DTMF capability in their software, even after all these years, and it was still limited to the * and # buttons. Numbers were not possible. Its as simple as pi with the Skype app which just uses the phone's own dialler, just like when you're making a call over the mobile network.

One other nice thing, when you fire up the Skype Client it warns you about data charges over 3G networks and suggests you either get an unlimited data tariff or join a WiFi network. Needless to say, I'm using it over my Wifi network at the moment.

One thing I'm unable to test at the moment is whether it receives incoming calls any better than Fring did.

You may recall I tested a SkypeIn number with Fring about a year ago and whilst the call eventually came through, most callers were fed up of the ring tone and gave up. I always put that down to the Fring gateway being slow. So I'd be interested to know from anyone using the native Skype app. and who has a SkypeIN number how well it works.