A parent’s primer to computer slang

No, I am not kidding. To wit:

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher could be important in certain situations and as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of Pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Ok, on the surface, the whole thing is almost legit – parents should be watching their children’s on-line activities. Anyone who says you should watch your own children has my attention for showing a brain cell.

Down at the end of the article, though, they go through a few examples of common leet words. Specifically, “Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity”. You know, the ones that may indicate piracy, like warez, sploits and pron.

So, the message is that parents should check on their children, but the only real worry is whether or not they are pirating software or trafficking in pornography. Never mind the cyber-stalker your 12 yr old daughter has been chatting up in the dominatrix chatroom. It’s all about the bottom line, wot?

Please, stop the hurting…

The St. Petersburg Times writes today about a man being arrested for using someone’s un-secured wireless access point to gain access to the internet. They do not know what he was doing yet, but he was acting in a very suspicious manner, and the article goes on to describe some of the possible nefarious activities he may have been up to.

I can’t stress this enough, people: you have to set up the security features yourself. Wireless routers and access points ship from the factory with all the security features you could want, but they are turned off by default. If you follow the simple tutorial included in the documentation, however, you can turn all of that on – it only takes five minutes. Here’s a short look at what you can do:

Router Password This is the password you need to enter to access and change the router’s settings. By default, this will be blank or the same as the administrative login. Change this first thing to keep others out, and make sure the remote admin setting is turned off unless you really need it.

AD-HOC Networks This is what you call it when your computers connect to each other without the use of a router or access point. It can be usefull for file transfers to strangers, which is obviously both good and bad. Turn this off.

SSID or ESSID – This is the name of your network, so you can easily identify yours from your neighbor’s. D-Link routers use ‘default’, and Linksys call theirs ‘Linksys’ out-of-the-box. Not changing this value will lead others to think your network is open and invites hackers and bandwidth snatchers.

You can change this to anything you like, within a limit of 28 or so characters. In my line of work, we set up quite a few of these, and every time I set one up, I can ‘see’ at least one default network name. (Funniest SSID I’ve seen:” justworkdamnit”. Apparently somebody was having issues.)

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As a quick warning, I upgraded the blog tonight due to a security hole in the php – please let me know if you encounter any problems. The nice part is it took me only 15 minutes.