With the falling costs of high-speed internet connections and wireless routers, there are a lot of people who are setting up wireless networks, both at their home and office. This has brought both a lot of convenience and security threats.

Believe it or not, it’s really easy to get into a wireless network. The basic wireless network connection program that is in WindowsXP will find most wireless networks. More advanced programs like NetStumbler find networks even faster.

Someone having access to your wireless network in and of iteself isn’t a terrible thing, but there are a number of malicious things that people can do once on your network. Even if all of your other computers are off, someone could still use your internet connection to anonymously do something illegal. Of more immediate concern is the potential that people could have access to your personal files, such as financial records.

So what can you do to protect your wirelss? Change the default settings! To do this, you simply log into your wireless router and change a couple of things. The process to do this varies by brand, but it will be something like this. Open your internet browser and type in 192.168.1.1. You don’t need a user name and the password is typically admin.

Once in, the first thing you should do is change the password. This will keep people from being able to change settings and blocking you from accessing your own network. I don’t think most people do this. I’ve driven around just to see how many wireless networks I could find. When I’ve done this, about 40-50% of the network I find I can get on. On top of that, if I wanted to I could have messed up people’s connection.

Ok, after you’ve canged the password you can do a couple other things to protect your network. First, add WEP protection. WEP is a password based encryption for your network. You will need to enter the same WEP key on any computer you use to access the wireless network.  Next, change the SSID (service set identifier). You can call your network anything you want. Lastly, turn off SSID broadcast.

These few steps will make your wireless network more secure. There are still ways that people can break through these basic settings, but not many people can do that. You’ll be protected from most everyone except the really good hackers.

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Have you ever wanted to backup your DVDs? I have. And I thought it was really hard, but it’s not. Mark Cuban recently talked about this  in his blog, so I thought I’d address it here.

DISCLAIMER:
I’d like to mention that this may or may not be legal. The program used to do this uses decypting, so this could be illegal. The following information and links are provided for informational/educational use only.

There are two programs needed to backup DVDs. The first is DVD Shrink. With this program you have the option to either make a full-disc backup of the DVD or re-author the disc. Full-disc mode takes everything that is on the original disc and shrinks it down so it will fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD-Recordable disc.

The re-author mode is cool because you can choose what content to include on the disc. If you don’t want to have any of the subtitles or alternate audio, you can choose to not include them. By doing this the quality of the video with improve.

There is one other program that’s useful in backing up DVDs. It’s PocketDivXEncoder. You’ll need to download the DivX Codecs before you can use this program. This program allows you to take the DVD that you ripped using DVD Shrink and save it as a DivX encoded avi file. This is nice in case you are going to go on a trip and you don’t want to keep track of a bunch of discs. You can backup the movies you want to watch, save them as standard video files, and watch them whenever you want. This method is great becasue you won’t use up as much battery life by not using your DVD drive.