Alexander’s Blog

A high-speed wireless network that covers most of downtown Seattle is being rolled out by Internet service provider Speakeasy. The Seattle company plans to have 10 to 15 test customers using the network by the end of the year, with Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley saying commercial deployment of the WiMax network will occur early next year. “This is the equivalent of putting in a T-1 line, but it is wireless,” said Chatterley. “It is going to change everything.”

The company chose Seattle as its first test market, citing the geographic challenges along with the demand for high-speed Internet in the downtown area. Speakeasy will roll out similar WiMax networks in other cities if the test in Seattle is successful, Chatterley said.

WiMax, which is short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a relatively new technology that provides wireless Internet access over great distances. Unlike Wi-Fi, which is typically confined to a couple of hundred feet in coffee shops or bookstores, WiMax networks have a range of several miles.

Pricing has not been finalized, but the company is considering charging about $650 per month for a wireless connection that reaches speeds of three megabits per second. That compares to $530 per month for a T-1 line, which is 1.5 megabits per second. A T-1 line is about 30 times faster than a dial-up modem.

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This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a microchip that can be implanted in humans to provide access to medical records. Privacy regulation advocates were predictably horrified, but the chip does not create the privacy crisis some might imagine.

I was working with Active Directory a couple of days ago and discovered something very interesting. I created a user account using a VB script. I mistyped the domain name in the UPN, which led to this discovery. First of all, here’s what the script looks like:

Set objOU=GetObject(”LDAP://OU=Executives,DC=nwtraders,DC=msft”)
Set objUser=objOU.Create(”User”, “cn=BillG”)
objUser.Put “sAMAccountName”, “BillG”
objUser.SetInfo
objUser.AccountDisabled=FALSE
objUser.ChangePassword “”, “P@ssw0rd”
objUser.Put “userPrincipalName”, “BillG@bogus.com”
objUser.Setinfo

Notice the domain I used in the UPN “BillG@bogus.com“. When I created the account, I was able to logon as that account. The user account Properties showed that the UPN is BillG@bogus.com. It looked like bogus.com was an alternate suffix because the dropdown box listed both the nwtraders.msft domain and the bogus.com domain. However, I verified that bogus.com was NOT listed as an alternate suffix in AD Domains and Trusts.

What’s interesting is that I can logon as the UPN BillG@bogus.com and continue to work fine but as soon as I logon with the UPN BillG@nwtraders.msft once, it deletes the bogus.com entry in the user’s Property (account tab).

I am wondering if there’s a way to take advantage of this “hidden” alternate suffix as far as security is concerned. If you have any thoughts, I’ll love to hear them.