Friday’s Gnomedex lunch was sponsored by the Greater Des Moines Partnership. After a rocky morning, the wireless Internet connectivity (in both 802.11b and 802.11a flavors) graciously provided to all takers by Proxim seems to have settled out. This is the kind of corporate sponsorship that would cause me to seriously consider their offerings if I didn’t already own equipment from a competitor.
I missed most of the second lunch speaker and roughly the first half of the next; I went up to my room to recharge my batteries.
The first ballroom speaker of the afternoon was Steve Gibson. Gibson maintains that the Internet is robust because of its distributed nature and redundancy. Exactly because of these same characteristics, local networks are open to attack. The script kiddies can take any machine on the Internet down, but the Internet as a whole is not vulnerable at that level.
If you’re running Windows, open a DOS window and, at the prompt, enter “netstat -an” (without the quotes). What is all that crap?
Doc Searls prepares for his Gnomedex address tomorrow.
Next up was Beth Goza, one of Microsoft’s product managers for the
Pocket PC Phone Edition, who demonstrates the new Microsoft-driven smartphones. When she shows that any .wav file can be a smartphone ring tone, she says, “DRM be damned; burn those ring tones.”Doc says she’s joking
; I prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt. Meeting Doc in the flesh has so far been the highlight of the road trip.
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