One man’s campaign for “real” telephone numbers
Microsoft’s James O’Neill has been on a crusade for a while now, trying to educate the world (well, the UK at least), that numbers written in the format +44 (0) 1234 567890 are wrong and that the E.164 format should be used instead. Of course, James is right (he explains more in a recent blog post and Ewan Dalton illustrates the issue a little more clearly in his post on the subject) but so many numbers are written incorrectly – it’s not uncommon to see 0207 xxx xxxx (the area code is 020 and the 7 is part of the local number) – and advertising only national rate numbers (as Microsoft does on it’s UK contact page) is not good practice either (another campaign related to phone numbers is Say No to 0870).
What I found particularly interesting is James’ explanation of making a phone number appear as a link in the form of tel:+44-1234-567890 so that those with a supported dialler (like Microsoft Office Communicator) can click to dial (for further information, see RFC 3966). I’ve updated my e-mail signature now (even if it does break the corporate rules for signature formatting)… unfortunately Outlook 2003 keeps on removing the link!
Confirmation that it is possible to upgrade from a retail edition to a volume license edition of Windows Vista
Just before I went on holiday, I rebuilt my company-supplied notebook PC to run Windows Vista (running Linux doesn’t look too good when you work in the Microsoft Practice of a major IT company). At the time, I didn’t have any volume license media and whilst I knew that all of the retail editions were contained in a single image on the retail DVD, that doesn’t include Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. Nevertheless, I installed Windows Vista Business Edition, choosing not to supply a product key (Vista allows 30 days before activation is required). Since then, a colleague has sent me the correct media and license keys, so tonight I was ready to rebuild on Windows Vista Enterprise Edition.
I say rebuild because I didn’t expect an in-place upgrade to work but it did – “upgrading” my Windows Vista installation to a new edition was as simple as dropping in the CD and running the installer. It seemed to take a lot longer than a fresh install (understandably) but I still have my user accounts, profile and data from prior to the upgrade. So, just to confirm, it is possible to upgrade from a retail to a volume license (enterprise) edition of Windows Vista.
BT Home Hub users beware
I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks holiday – a rare opportunity to spend some quality time with my wife and sons. Over that time, blogging has taken a back seat – although I had taken my laptop with me it was on the basis that it was somewhere to back up the digital photos and anything remotely work-related was strictly banned… but I’m an Internet junkie and I just had to get online.
Turning on the laptop revealed weak signals from a number of free wifi providers in the area with names like “Netgear”, “Linksys” and “D-Link”. Of course, these were unsecured access points using default configurations but more worrying were the wireless networks that Windows Vista classed as security-enabled, named “BTHomeHub-xxxx“.
The BT Home Hub is a popular ADSL router in the UK and, although I’ve never used one, judging by what I saw WEP appears to be the default configuration (I certainly didn’t find any evidence of anybody using anything else) – BT Home Hub users should be made aware that wired equivalent privacy (WEP) is by no means secure and can be cracked very quickly, as Michael Ossmann details in his WEP dead again articles part 1 and part 2 and as Steve Gibson explained in episode 89 of the Security Now podcast (transcript).
I should stress that I did not use any of the methods that Mike or Steve describe to hack into anybody’s network but I was tempted. Next time I may even give it a try… all in the name of security research of course.