I recently decided that since I have a laptop and a wireless card, I should put it to use. Not that there was anything really wrong with my old router, except that it’s a cheap Belkin with no wireless capability, a 10mbps WAN port, and the worst web interface I’ve ever seen. I took the plunge and bought a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router. The WRT54G is one of the most well-known routers in the world, and the WRT54GL was created for the enthusiast community. The WRT54GL has extra memory and firmware space, and the firmware is released under the GPL. Of course it has to be, because Linksys chose Linux as the kernel for the router. The first thing I did was I installed the DD-WRT firmware package on it, and it is really neat! My $50 router now has the functionality of a $500 router. It really is a lot of fun.

I was browsing around the site for the OSX86 project when I came across a link to a very interesting paper that counters such famous papers such as Ross Anderson’s FAQ on Trusted Computing. I’m sure that most of you are aware of this whole Trusted Computing deal - the idea was to make your computer more secure by allowing encryption to be more tightly integrated into the way your computer works. Unfortunately companies like Microsoft (surprise, surprise) decided to take advantage of that and use Trusted Computing for purposes such as DRM - to lock users out of their own files. I could go on and on about this but I’ll leave that to sites like Wikipedia and GNU.org. This paper is interesting because it says that Trusted Computing can be quite easily integrated into Linux - especially because the reference code is released under the GPL. That said, I think I’m in favor of Trusted Computing so long as it is ultimately under the control of the user and it can be disabled should something go wrong. I will never use any type of Trusted Computing in a proprietary operating system, for fear that it will be used against me.