Article: "Fliers get advice on Internet etiquette"

The link: http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2009-07-13-etiquette-flying-internet_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

I honestly don't know which worries (or, rather, concerns) me the most about this:

" Tip #134. "The lavatory is not your personal conference room." "

To me, this is yet another "duh" moment. And with a capital, bold, italicized "D." As in, this should be a no-brainer.

Yet they included it. I understand their reasoning, however. It means that they're concerned about this happening (and given people today, it's very possible - if not likely) or it's already happened.

Given that any number of corporations are worried about proprietary and/or confidential and/or sensitive material being displayed on people's laptop screens, I can understand that some "executive" would take their laptop into there and participate in a meeting to discuss a new product launch. But I wouldn't want to be that "executive" when I run into the person who really needed to use the lavatory, but couldn't. Just imagine that poor person who had needed in there had instead gone in his trousers. Talk about a mess ... and smell.

And it's not just business people either. You could quite easily make a case that some politician had received a rather raunchy email from his mistress and went into the lavatory to ... you know what. Or they're "sexting" over Instant Message while he's staring at a scantily-clad picture of her which he'd set as his wallpaper. Assuming she's clad at all.

And then there could be the person out in seat 28F which was playing a loud shoot-em-up game with friends over the Internet. Except she hadn't brought her headphones (they were in her checked luggage) and she just had to have the sound on so that she could tell if somebody was sneaking up behind her. Let's take that scenario one step further ... her boyfriend in the seat next to her is also playing the same game (with the same friends) and he didn't have his headphones either. Oh, and he's got his sounds on for the same reason. Possible?

Granted, the ping rate would be horrible and you'd suffer from massive packet loss, but I'm willing to bet that somebody would try it.

" "Any time we have a new way to spend time on an airplane ... it's a good idea to think about how it affects those around us," says Anna Post, an etiquette expert and spokeswoman for the Emily Post Institute. "14B is not your office. It's an airline seat. Treat it as such." " (Link is USATODAY.com's and is left intact.)

All of that, however, doesn't begin to address another issue - that being security. By now, we all know that WEP is badly, horribly broken. There are tools out there now that can break this in under a minute. Yet I'm willing to bet that some IT guy at some airline is going to stick with WEP because that's what they're familiar with, and learning WPA takes too long.

Your laptop locks onto the Wi-Fi signal, but unfortunately, there's also a trojan running in somebody else's computer. (It's not their fault, they don't know it's there.) Suddenly, your computer gets infected. Unfortunately, since you also plug this computer into the LAN at work ... your corporate LAN could now be at risk. I just hope it doesn't install a keylogger or packet sniffer.

And while it's true that WPA hasn't been hacked, yet, there is a significant vulnerability with it. That being, of course, the password. How many times have we heard that we need a strong password? Yet you'd be surprised how many people's password is "password." Even changing upper and lower-case letters "PaSsWoRd" really won't help save this one.

And then there's the person that will use an obscure word in a dictionary. While it's not bad against your common person, it's useless against a brute-force, dictionary attack. While better than no password, a weak one isn't much of a defence. And you could still end up with an infected computer.

" "I'm praying cellphones don't get approved," she [Anna Post] says. "It will be anarchy." "

Oy, I don't even want to think about that one. I still think the things should be banned in restaurants.