September 2006
Some folks were talking during a break in one of my courses about banks and the newfangled authentication systems they’re using, such as two-factor authentication. This turned into a discussion of phishing, and it occurred to me that RSS feeds would solve that problem very nicely.
Right now, banks (and PayPal and eBay, etc) email notifications when they want to tell their customers something. The problem is, you have no way of knowing whether the email is actually coming from your bank. If banks set up a personalized RSS feed for their customers, customers who subscribe to their personal feed have the comfort of knowing that they’re getting the info right from the source. Security wouldn’t be a huge issue. Grabbing an RSS feed is just like grabbing a web page: you can password-protect them and encrypt the connection. Because RSS is built on top of mature web protocols, most of the security problems have already been solved.
Most people don’t use RSS, and that’s okay. You wouldn’t need to replace the email notifications. Just make the RSS system available for people who want to use it. By introducing customers to RSS and demonstrating how they can use it to protect themselves, banks would spur adoption of RSS, which would provide incentive for people to come up with more creative uses, etc.
Fortunately, I’m not the first person to notice this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like any of the big players are moving in this direction, even though it’s a rather simple idea to implement.
Tags: Phishing, security, technology, the_failure_of.html, web
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I bought a laser printer on Craigslist (a Samsung ML-2010) and decided to set it up as a networked printer so that everyone in my new Canadian apartment could use it. I bought a Motorola WPS870G print server, which is a cool little gadget that doesn’t cost much. It supports 1 USB and 1 parallel port printer, and connects to either a wired or wireless network (which is a must here). However, it rebuffed all of my Powerbook’s attempts to print to it, and the Internet insisted that I’d wasted my money. But I figured it out after a few hours and thought I’d put the solution up here.
Step one is to get the router to the point where you can connect to it via web browser. The WPS870G comes with a special setup utility that presumably makes this easier, but it’s Windows-only. Anyway, the instructions go into tedious detail about how to get to this stage with a web browser.
Once you’ve done this, give the router a static IP address and log back into it using the new address.
Next, we set up the printer on the Mac. This assumes you have the correct driver for your printer already installed. For instance, the Samsung came with a driver CD we had to install.
There’re like a dozen different protocols you can use to print to a network computer. When you click “Add” in the Printer Setup Utility, it’ll try to find the printer on the network. It might succeed, but even if it finds something, it probably won’t print properly when you install it.
What you need to do is hold the alt/option key down while clicking “More Printers”. This enables the Advanced mode and shows the manual printer configuration screen. The drop-down list at the top shows all the protocols you can use to connect to the printer. None of them worked for me. Click “Advanced” in that drop-down menu.
Set “Device” to “LPD/LPR Host or Printer”. “Device Name” can be whatever you want — it’ll be the name for the printer when you print something. The Device URI is the important part. It should be:
lpd://router.ip.address/L2
or, if you’re plugging the printer into the parallel port:
lpd://router.ip.address/L1
Then set “Printer Model” to the model of your printer. Since you’ve already installed the drivers, it should appear in the list. Click “Add” to finish and try printing a test page from your computer.
I know that you can also enter in LPD details into one of the non-advanced boxes, but that didn’t work for me. I had to do it the hard way.
Hopefully someone finds this useful.
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