security

An Analog Phone For Our Front Gate

DoorBellFone-250 A short while ago I briefed you on my years-long search and utterly frustrating search for the perfect, affordable, SIP/IP-based door phone, preferably with video. Having set aside that lofty goal, I resigned myself to retain primarily the “affordable” aspect of the prior set of specifications, which lead me to look for an analog door phone.

There are many analog door phones available from companies like 2N, Adtran, Avaya, Bogen, NEC, Panasonic, Valcom & Viking, just to name a few. For my project, based upon some advice from friends, I settled upon Door Bell Fon as a suitable choice.

As a vendor I selected Home Controls since they had inventory, a good price, and seemed to have some experience with the product. My order included the DP28C control module, a DP38 NBZF door station and DP38 BXFS surface mount box. The total cost was right around $300.

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Get That Will You Dear? A Phone For The Door Or Gate

My efforts at blogging began on November of 2007. Since then I’ve covered a variety of topics, mostly relating to issues of home office communications and network infrastructure. In all that time one item has remained on my honey-do list; the intercom or access phone at the front gate. At long last, I’ve ordered the parts to finally deploy some kind of solution, even if  it’s not exactly what I was hoping for.

The first question to answer is why do we need a gate intercom in the first place?

Working from a one-man home office one of the biggest inconveniences I face is taking deliveries from courier companies. Like many homes, we have a fenced yard, so the delivery person cannot get up to the font door to knock. Even if they did, my office is in the back of the property, in what was once a garage apartment, so I wouldn’t hear them knocking on the front door.

Further, with our two Labrador Retrievers occasionally in the yard there’s some sense in keeping the delivery people at the gate. It’s safer, both for them and the dogs.

There’s a button for doorbell at the front gate, but it hasn’t worked in years. The doorbell mechanism in the house was long since removed, given my equally longstanding intention to install something better. I’ve been searching for “something better” for quite some time. That something better has proven difficult to find.

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X-Marks Lives!

For the past couple of years I've been enjoying Xmarks. Xmarks is a browser plug-in that provides secure, cross-browser and cross-platform bookmark & password sync. Xmarks makes it easy to move from desktop to laptop or netbook and have all…

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Life In The Time Of FireSheep

A couple of weeks ago at Toorcon security researcher Eric Butler released a curious new plug-in for the the popular Firefox web browser. Known as FireSheep this plug-in allows even an unskilled person to monitor traffic on an open wifi network. It further allows its users to capture the login data exposed as web browsers of other people on that WLAN perform logins to sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc.

I won’t go into how it works since others had done a nice job of that already. Suffice it to say that this is scary stuff given how common it is for people to use open wifi networks at public places, usually without giving it a second thought..

FireSheep was not intended as a tool for criminal or malicious activity. It’s release was intended to expose a security issue in the way web browsers handle cookies arising from login. While the login process itself is secure, the handling of the resulting cookies usually is not.

Whatever the intent, it’s certain that some less scrupulous people will use it or the lessons learned from it for illicit purposes such as identity theft.

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