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Netgear RangeMax NEXT WNR834B Wireless Router

Q: Q: How secure are wireless routers for sharing internet between computers? - Carol in London Ontario

A: Wireless routers have received a lot of bad press lately. I have seen a number of reports on different news programs about the insecurity of wireless routers. The fact is wireless routers are secure if they are configured to be secure. The problem with security in wireless routers is that people generally don't configure them to ensure security. The perception tends to be that configuring a secure wireless network is too difficult. The fact is that most wireless routers comes with easy to follow instructions on how to enable encryption on the router to secure the network. If you follow the steps as laid out in the instructions for securing your network then your network is reasonably secure. By default a wireless router is wide open, which means that anyone can hack into your network.

You may think that no one would bother hacking into your home network, but the fact is people do just that. The process is called "War Driving". Basically the hacker drives around with a laptop and wireless network card, his laptop notifies him when it picks up a network connection that he can use and he parks his car and uses the newly found network connection. This allows the hacker to use your internet connection for whatever he wants, hacking into other systems and leaving a trace back to your network, surfing for illegal pornography, or anything they want to do on the internet and not have traced back to them.

One method is to use MAC address filters. Using the management software that came with the router you would be able to specify which specific computers would have access to the router. Because MAC addresses are hard coded to a network card you would be ensuring that only the computers you specify are permitted to use your network. The problem with this method is that it takes a considerable amount of manual configuration, however the instructions for doing this configuration should be included in the documentation for your router.

The generally preferred method for home networks is WEP, or Wireless Encryption Protocol. This method works by establishing a shared key, or password, between the router and the computer. Data is encrypted before being sent over the airways and the key is needed in order to send to the router or receive from the router. In other words, the computer would have to have the password in order to use the connection.

While there is no such thing as the 100% secure wireless network there is certain precautions you should take in order to ensure the security of your home wireless network.

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Q:My email program seems to be blocking out notices that are sent to me from an internet message board that I post on. But I never added their address to my "block sender" list, and it's not shown on the list either. How is this happening? - Susie, in U.S.A.

A:: This is not an easy question to answer without more information. There could be a number of things happening here. A lot of this depends on your email program and who your Internet Service Provider, or ISP, is. Different email programs handle filtering in different ways.

You said that you did not add their address to your block sender list. It is possible though that you blocked them for another reason without realizing it. Carefully review your filter settings to ensure you are not blocking them for another reason. For example, you might be blocking them due to something in the subject line, ask the administrator of the board to send you the specifications for emails from the board. They should be able to tell you what the subject of the emails are and what is automatically added to each message. Also ask them for the IP address that emails are being sent from, if they can tell you this information it would be very helpful down the road if you find that it is not your email program filtering the messages.

It is possible that it is not your email program blocking the messages, but rather your ISP. Your ISP may consider the host of the message board to be a spammer and thus consider all emails from that domain to be spam. Several ISP's "blacklist" spammers for abuse of their email server. They consider it an abuse because all the incoming mail from spammers slows down service for all of their subscribers. Blacklisting spammers is a common practice, before you blame your ISP though you should carefully review your filtering rules to ensure you are not filtering the messages yourself. If you suspect that your ISP has blacklisted the domain you can phone or email them and request that the message board emails be removed from the blacklist. They may not wish to do this, but it never hurts to ask, they may be willing to consider it if they know that emails from the message board are not spam, but rather legitimate emails.

Most email programs place all blocked email into the trash bin or a filtered folder. Review these folders for a message from the board, if you see a message from them in either of these folders then it is definitely not your ISP blocking the messages. However if you are using a web based email program such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Outlook Web Access, your filtered mail may not show up in one of these folders regardless of if it is your filtration rules or your email provider's and you will have to rely on your examination of the filtration rules you set up to determine if it was your mistake or your ISP's.

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