Happenings Around the Shop

Tired of hearing busy signals?? Paying for an extra phone line for internet?? Are you STILL waiting for that page to load?? Wish you could do something about it??

SPITwSPOTS, Homer’s premier wireless internet provider has the answer!

“DITCH YOUR DIAL-UP!” and switch to SPITwSPOTS premier wireless network.

Call 299-4052, and tell us you want to “ditch your dial-up”, and we’ll credit the amount of your last dial-up bill! Show us your canceled dial-up subscription, and we’ll match in credit whatever your last bill was.

We will also show you how you can ditch your setup fee! With our “PICK YOUR PLAN” Payment System it’s easy!

Our premium subscriptions with no setup fee start at speeds up to eight times faster than your dial-up for only $26.08/mo!

Call 299.4052 today and “DITCH YOUR DIAL-UP!”

SPITwSPOTS, Homer’s internet future is here.

We are proud to announce that we have opened up a shop/office in the same building as the Grog Shop, just down the walkway on the left. We have a bright friendly OPEN sign in the window. Please swing by and say hello. We are offering spyware and virus removal for $80. Find our coupon, and get $20 off.

I trust most everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I know I sure did. It’s nice to think about the things we are grateful for. And we here in the shop are most definitely grateful to you, our customers and community for giving us this opportunity to serve you.

We are getting ready to launch our new store. Our goal is to have the doors open on Monday, Dec. 4th. Our hours will be 10am till 2pm Mon-Fri. We will be offering Spyware and virus removal ala “Aaron’s Secret Formula” for $80 per computer. Our shop is located in the same building as the Grog Shop, down the walk way, the door at the top of the far stairs. There will be a sign to guide your way. It will be a quick move in, and we hope to see you there. We are excited about opening an office as it will allow YOU greater access to us and we can serve you immediately. So tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell anyone who complains that their computer is too slow, or that they get terrible pop ups, or if it seizes when Internet Explorer is turned on. Call us if YOUR computer is running slow and funky and such.

Almost EVERY machine is usually infected by some sort of adware, spyware, data miners, harmful cookies, and unless you clean it regularly, your computer will collect a lot of “stuff” to sift through, and cause poor performance. Not to mention that data miners, sift through your info, and upload it to their servers, using up your precious bandwidth. The more of these there are on a machine, the more bandwidth they can chew up, slowing your connection.

Enough of PunK’s techno babble….

Have a happy holiday season.

The SPITwSPOTS team has grown. We have been gifted with the addition of Corey Rosano. He moved up recently from Oregon and found a natural place in both my home and in SPITwSPOTS. We are very glad he is here. Firstly, we can all thank him for the new logo. His input and creativity have affected many things, from how we are organized, to redesigning and cleaning up professional documents, contracts, and proposals. His experience is compatible with how we do things around here, and he has fit right in in MANY ways. Thanks for helping out and joining the team Corey.

Well it should be fairly obvious that I have changed the format of the news room here. This is blogging software by Wordpress. I have modified the “Winter” theme by Ron and Andrea. Thanks for a great template to learn from.

Please feel free to get involved and leave comments and such. We can all learn this together.

Another new feature we have implemented is a live help chat feature found on any splash/access page. Having trouble?

Find this button for immediate support. To locate it, go to your login page, it’s located under our logo and phone number. Click on it and instantly start a chat session with one of our tech people.

If it looks like this, leave us a message, and we’ll get back at ‘cha.

Also in the works is a fresh advertising campaign, an office soon to come, and another premium SPITwSPOTS service to bring to Homer. Details are under our hat at the moment, but keep in touch here, and you’ll be the first to know.

Respect,

Brian “PunK” Ormond
webmaster@spitwspots.com

I don’t know about all of you out there, but I have been dealing with an inordinate amount of spam lately. Spam in my inbox, spam on my forums, people calling me about spam, e-mailing me about spam… So I have decided to fight back and do something about it.I have had two different sorts of spam. SPAM bots on forums I provide, and spam in e-mail. (Most of us do I believe.) I have done some research and to date seem to have stopped, or at least quelled for the moment, the spam posts on infected forums. www.spitwspots.com/phpbb/, and (unrelated), www.thecramerfamilyreunion.com/phpbb/. I was the victim of spam bots, or programs designed to crawl the web looking for places to post commercial messages. I found a script that seems to have stopped it for now. I’ll also be ever more vigilant in the future as well.

As for Spam in the inbox, with the help of our web hosting company, www.Bluehost.com, I found an open source solution called SPAM Assassin www.spamassassin.org and have implemented it on the mail server for SPITwSPOTS and all people who have an e-mail address through us here. The good news is that this seems to be doing about half the job. The bad news is it seems to being doing about half the job. UPDATE: I have just turned on a feature called SPAMbox that aids in the auto filtering of the spam you are receiving. (This may be the other half.) If you wish to use your pop3 e-mail client to check the spam box, just add “/spam” (without the quotes) to the end of your pop3 login. (Example: yourname@spitwspots.com/spam). Call me @ 299.4052 if you need help with this.

From the documentation I have read so far, it seems to work along these lines: When using Outlook, Outlook Express, Macintosh Mail, or most email user agents, there should be a way to mark messages as “Junk”. When you do, your user agent sends a note to SPAMassassin on the mail server and it flags or tags all the info about the email. When it gets five warnings of the same info, it blocks it. So this is a “community effort”. Aaron has seen these EXACT SAME SPAMS on users’ computers that ARE NOT A PART OF THE SWS NETWORK. Meaning, this is rampant on MOST networks right now, and working together, we can each help rid ourselves this annoyance.

I found another layer of protection, one you can implement yourself, should you find SPAMassassin not getting the WHOLE job done. In a quick Google search, I found two programs that stood out as good spam blockers that work in conjunction with your user agent. It turns out that users of Outlook Express do not have a “report spam” feature, so here are two programs that add this feature. I have used SPAMbully for about 24 hrs as of this post, and I can say that I have gone from 15-18 spam’s per day, or 1 every hour or so, to 1 in the last 18 hours, and have not seen any since. Something here is working, and doing it’s job well. This program is also very easy to use. I plan on removing the program, seeing if the spam returns, then testing SPAMfighter to see how that works. I’ll post how the tests go.

And let me say loud and clear: I AM NOT A SPAM EXPERT! I can use all the knowledgeable help I can get. It would be great to see some forum participation, so I have created a Spam! topic for users to post questions, help tactics, personal stories and such. I believe it’s going to take an amount of cooperation to effectively battle this global phenomenon.

…And to those of you who know who you are….IF YOU’RE BUYING VIAGRA, REPLICA WATCHES, AND PIRATED SOFTWARE, STOP! THIS IS EXACTLY WHY THESE PEOPLE CONTINUE TO DO THIS TO US. BECAUSE IT IS PROFITABLE. IF WE TAKE AWAY THE PROFIT, BY NOT BUYING THIS CRAP, THEY WILL STOP!

Eh hem.

Excuse me.

My apologies for the rant. (I now step down from soapbox)

I’ll meet you all in the forums and we’ll work this out if it’s been a problem for you, too.

Respect,

Brian “PunK” Ormond
webmaster@spitwspots.com

SPITwSPOTS member Nancy wrote in asking:Webmaster: I have two questions,

1. What is the difference between a secure vs. a non secure hot spot? Anyone can log on to either, right?
2. Why so much rebooting of nodes since Sept 26?

Let’s start with this; there are two categories to consider when discussing wireless security, 1) data encryption and 2) whether the users are firewalled from each other.

When data is being sent wirelessly, all traffic can be “sniffed”, meaning a third party has the ability to watch pieces of info, or packets, to go through the air. To secure your data a router will encrypt, or scramble it. With the proper code, the data is unscrambled and read. So, when you sign on to an access point and it asks for WEP encryption or such, it is asking for your piece of the math problem, or the “key” to unlock the code.

A public wireless network by default has to be unencrypted because people need to be able to connect. If one were to give out this key publicly, what would be the use? A private hotspot will ask for an encryption code before allowing you access.

Now, there are two jump points to be concerned with, one being from your laptop to the access point, and then the wireless network’s internal jumps.

We established that when a wireless signal leaves your machine, on its way to a router, it can be sniffed. On the SPITwSPOTS network, we solve this by offering an optional VPN connection, which is a Virtual Private Network. It encrypts the data between your laptop and the SwS network’s hard ware. SPITwSPOTS is the only local provider offering VPN connectivity to it’s premium members for full time security.

As for internal traffic, most all ISP’s have their own internal encryption. SPITwSPOTS uses many layers of high level encryption.

A HOTwSPOT is a secure open public access point. It allows anyone to log on while maintaining firewalls between users, meaning you cannot access any other computers on the network. (Nor can anyone else access your machine.) The second layer is called VPN security. A VPN connection allows for your data to be encrypted from the moment it leaves your laptop’s wireless card. This option is currently only available to premium users. For instructions on how to use a VPN connection, click here, or call Aaron @ 399.3379

So what does all this mean? Unsecured hotspots can cause problems and concern because your data could not only be sniffed, but any open or shared files you have may be freely accessed, and any virus’ or spyware on ANY other machine on the network, can infect you as well. This means that if one computer on an unsecured network is infected by a virus, it can then potentially spread to any other computer on the network. Not good.

Unfortunately, there are no easy tests to see if a network is secure, but there are ways available. One way consists of using two computers to access the network, and seeing if you can contact each other through the network. If you can ping or find the other computer’s files, you are not firewalled from other users, and thus are on an unsecured network. On a secure hotspot you should not be able to ping or access another computer’s files.

WHEW!!! With all that out of the way, there are several reasons that nodes have been rebooting since Sept. 24. We have had many changes in the RF (radio frequency) environment, (due mainly from noise from other wireless sources) and to rectify this, we make settings changes on the equipment, and many times this requires a reboot. Also, we have had an excessive number of compact flash failures. The operating system we use is stored on Compact Flash cards, (similar to USB thumb drives, but internal on the motherboard) and these cards have been failing on us, and we have been exploring why for several months. Unfortunately neither we, nor the OS developer knows why yet. We believe it’s a manufacturing defect, so we are currently changing the manufacturer of our CF cards. Failing CF cards is hard on our gear, and causes reboots. Finally, configuration changes also play a role. Think of the network as a living organism, and it becomes more tangible; it needs to be fed and loved each day to be sure it’s operating efficiently.

Hope all this techno jargon has answered your questions, and thanks for writing in Nancy .

Nancy received a free one week 1024 k pass for submitting questions that we posted and answered. The challenge remains to the rest of you loyal readers out there… send in a question that we post, and receive a free one week 1024 k pass. Not a bad deal, just ask Nancy .

Respect,

Brian “PunK” Ormond & the SPITwSPOTS Team
webmaster@spitwspots.com

Another week another post. As I sit and try to think of something to report on, I find that in a one week time, either little, or a lot can happen. This week, little went on in SPITwSPOT wLand. So, I am asking YOU, THE BELOVED READERS to help me out. Please drop me a line and let me know your topics of interest, questions left unanswered, that we can attempt to answer, or send me a review of our service. If I post it, I’ll give you a one week 1028k pass. (A $37.50 value!) Since it is YOU who I am writing to, it would be great to find out what you want reported on. This is my post. This is my challenge to you. Chat at ‘cha next week.Respect,
Brian “PunK” Ormond

It’s been so long I don’t even know where to begin.Since last I posted we have stabilized our new OS and fixed most all the problems with the access page. The last one being that for some reason, one cannot login with the Firefox browser. Sorry for the inconvenience to any and all Firefox users. We also redesigned the access page (several times) and I would love to hear feedback and YOUR comments on how the user experience is. Our goal is to make it as clean, simple, easy and intuitive as possible. Help us to accomplish this goal by letting us know what you think. Click on the “Login Page” link to the top-left, and E-mail me.

We are happy to announce a great HOTwSPOT package that is already in place at the Washboard, the Lighthouse Village, The Alibi, and Bay Ave Bed and Breakfast. Swing by any of these places and see what a SECURE public HOTwSPOT feels like. Call Brian (me) at 299-4052 for more info.

We are also celebrating “Two Years of Wireless” with an Autumn Special. $100 off ANY setup through October! Any HOTwSPOT, Professional, or Residential setup receives this discount. Thanks to all of you who have made this landmark possible. Thanks for believing in our dream.

Sadly, we never made it across the bay this summer. WE ARE STILL LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE. CALLING ALL FORWARD THINKERS OUT THERE TO HELP MAKE THIS HAPPEN!!!

Well that’s about all for this post. Aaron has passed me a new challenge to write here more often. If I start to slack again, please email me nasty letters saying how much you miss the new posts and I’ll get back on it.

Respect,
Brian “PunK” Ormond

We welcome the spring and the opportunities that it brings. We have launched the Halibut Cove Project (currently discontinued) and look forward to the responses it generates. Also in the works is a yet un-named project to get a wireless signal over to Jackoloff Bay, Little Jackoloff Bay, Tutka Bay, Little Tutka Bay, and the MacDonald Spit. Also, we have just learned the newest rules for wireless internet grants to rural villages. So, as we review them, we will possibly start heading towards Port Graham as well, as there has been expressed interest there. So in general, we are focusing this summer towards getting a signal across the bay. We will of course still be here for our local members as always, and look forward to growth as we continue forward with “The INSANLEY GREAT Network”. Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to either call me @ 299.4052 or email me at webmaster@spitwspots.com.Also, I would like to highlightAaron’s recent blog post explaining the nature of the network recently. (Also available through the “SPITwSPOTS Team Blogging Post” link on the Navigation menu to the left under Stuff.)

Well that’s what comes to mind at the moment. I’ll keep you posted.

Brian “PunK” Ormond
webmaster@spitwspots.com