After days of waiting I finally got my iPhone 3G.

I'm currently at COB Speicher in Iraq (been here since 21st of September). Presently, my internet access is considerably limited, but I'm doing alright other than that.

I'm in Kuwait at the moment and the camp where I am has pre-paid wireless hotspots that use MAC filtering to block unauthenticated users and redirect them to a login page. After, successful authentication the MAC is white listed. It's pretty weak security that can be bypassed by:

1. Running Kismet or Airsnort to capture some packets
2. Running Wireshark to find traffic other than people getting stuck at a login page (i.e., authenticated users)
3. Changing the MAC of your NIC to that of an authenticated user
4. Connecting happily

There's just one day left between now and deployment.

Resume

I started working on easy-to-follow, baby-step approach tutorials on how to use encryption on Windows. My motivation is to teach my wife how to install and use GnuPG and eventually OTR and TrueCrypt. So far, I've completed the GnuPG How-To. Hopefully someone else is able to find it useful.

I finished fully disassembling and then reassembling my laptop and somehow I have four screws left over. I wonder if I'm going to be screwed as a result...

Update: I disassembled it again and upon reassembling this time I was able to put all screws back in place (including those four previously forgotten screws).

Circumventing firewalls with SSH tunneled SOCKS proxies a la ssh -D localport user@sshproxyhost

The past few days I've been experiencing major packet loss. For a few minutes or hours I sporadically get half-decent service.

I spoke to one TimeWarner Cable tech who had me read out a traceroute to google.com. (Yes, line by line; times and IPs of all 15 hops.)

The traceroute showed major packet loss and extremely high response times for whatever few packets that actually made it. I was transferred to a higher level tech. This girl asked me to email the traceroute output to her showing that my connection was near dead. Sadly, she wasn't joking.

Updated 2007-08-09: Tech came by corrected the line noise issue. All should be good now.

I'm in the Army (yeah, I know, what was I thinking?). I'm about to do a 15 month deployment to Iraq. I have about a month left before I go. All I can think about is what kind of Internet connection I'll have and how long it will take to run apt-get...