Is your Xfinity modem a Public Hotspot?

An interesting subject was brought up at our Friday meetings couple weeks ago about how Comcast is testing a new service for making your Xfinity modem into a public hotspot for the community around you. They are doing this by creating a second signal for each device that is totally separate from the one that you use for your personal connection to the Internet through their modem. Comcast states that the secondary signal does not take away any of your speed for your side of the connection.

They also say that there is no cross connection, so you don't have to worry about somebody hopping onto your side of the network. This public access is only available to those Comcast subscribers of the Xfinity Wi-Fi network service.

"Comcast’s newest Wireless Gateway broadcasts two Wi-Fi signals," the company said. "By default, one is securely configured for the private use of the home subscriber. The second is a neighborhood 'xfinitywifi' network signal that can be shared. This creates an extension of the Xfinity Wi-Fi network and will allow visiting Xfinity Internet subscribers to sign in and connect using their own usernames and passwords."

This service is being piloted in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and the greater Washington, DC metro area.

There doesn't seem to be much advantage to individual Comcast subscribers when they are at home, since anyone with a home wireless network can already set up a guest access for visitors. But subscribers could potentially benefit when their out of the house and happened to be near another Comcast subscribers wireless Gateway. Through a partnership with the CableWiFi Alliance, Comcast already has a network of more than 150,000 hotspots in more than a dozen US cities.

There been several discussions on the benefits of providing this type of service besides the obvious one of expanding a user subscription benefit, one being that it provides hotspot access for emergency use or emergency communications.

The Comcast says there is no problem with interference, one concern that I have is the number of channels that will be used in a highly concentrated area and what kind of degradation you can expect from doubling the impact from each of these connections. Are these motives intelligent enough to help with this type of issue is a question that needs to be answered. I know that with products like Aruba wireless networking that we run into this concern all the time. So I can imagine that this might not be an issue in apartment complexes where you would have many households that might be providing additional signals, congesting the airwaves.

Sophos Anti-Virus engine for Microsoft Windows - vulnerability notification

Sophos has recently been notified of a vulnerability in Sophos Anti-Virus Engine (SAV Engine) running on Microsoft Windows platforms. The vulnerability could in theory have allowed a remote attacker to manipulate the SAV Engine, which could result in protection being disabled or bypassed by an attacker. This vulnerability affects the Endpoint Security and Control for Windows client included in our Endpoint/Enduser, PureMessage, and SharePoint products. The vulnerability has been fixed in the January engine, which was released on the 22nd of January. If products are configured in Sophos Enterprise Console to use the “recommended” subscription, they will be updated automatically. This is the default setup, so only customers who have chosen to use ‘fixed’ or ‘previous’ subscriptions will need to take action to ensure they receive the update right away. Sophos Cloud customers and users of the standalone client will all be automatically updated. At Sophos, we constantly invest in making our products as secure as possible. When security issues like this are identified, we prioritize fixing them as quickly and completely as possible.  We would like to thank the researcher, Graham Sutherland from Portcullis Computer Security Ltd, for identifying this vulnerability and for disclosing it responsibly. If you have customers using SAVi or SAVDi: From the January release onwards, SAVi and SAVDi on Windows will only run as one of the following user accounts or groups: Administrators LocalSystem LocalService NetworkService If an application without these permissions attempts to use SAVi, it will receive the following error return code: 0xa0040200 – SOPHOS_SAVI_ERROR_ INITIALISING On SAVDi the error message will be: “SAVI interface could not be initialized” For additional information about this vulnerability, please see this knowledgebase article.

TeamViewer-One alternative for LogMeIn Free

One of the major changes in product availability this past 7 to 10 days that has affected me the most has been the loss of the product called LogMeIn free. This product help me out quite a bit as a management tool between my home in my office PCs. I had made a significant personal commitment to this in purchasing mobile tablet versions of LogMeIn Ignition which allowed me to access my PCs using my phone and either android or IOS tablets. So initially I went back to using our internal product called ScreenConnect but it didn't provide the security that I wanted personally so I get back into the pool to look for another solution.

One of the products it had been bandied about in industry postings, was a product called Team Viewer which has a noncommercial free product and is very much like the LogMeIn Free product that I was leaving behind. I was surprised how quick the connection was to access each of my workstations, much faster than LogMeIn Free was. But the actual capabilities of the program shows at the product is not as mature as LogMeIn Free. It does pass through sound and video fairly well with only a slight degradation of the actual video stream and the sound quality is quite good so those two things are both positive. The actual screen display seems a little bit crisper but that might be my own imagination.

I would say that more than 90% of the things that I would possibly need in doing remote support are there so being a free product this makes this a very viable replacement to LogMeIn Free. It has a very nice file transfer function which allows you to move files between the two machines very easily and again amazingly very quickly. The program takes up just shy of 300 K in memory so it does not require too many resources to run in.

The professional version of TeamViewer also includes online meeting and online presentation modes, has a one time fee but still seems a little bit overpriced to me. It does run on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and most phone operating systems. But I'm not sure I would recommend this product over GoToMeeting, GotoMyPC or the professional version of LogMeIn you know they both have continuing costs over the years. I like the broader range of capabilities that are inherent in those products. One aspect to remember is that when you purchase a license of the commercial version of TeamViewer that you don't have to purchase a license for each of the machines that you are attaching to. Those clients are all free.

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