Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Remember a while back we mentioned about the new mobile 3G WiFi that the 3 network put out called MiFi. Well now the mobile company are updating it’s wares for a version designed for use in the car. So if you’re looking for a mobile internet setup in your car to entertain your backseaters or for your business purposes read on.

The MiFi router was impressive when we first got wind of it a few months back allowing the user to  create a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot surfing on a 3G network. This could then be divided into Wi-Fi gadgets, laptops, netbooks, games consoles, whatever needed a wireless internet connection on the go. What this new kit adds is car compatibility. A car charger and a windscreen mounted holder.

This allows users in the car to grab a secure wireless connection on the move allowing internet surfing, mobile online games whether it be handheld or via a laptop just whatever you can use it for. Now bundled with the car charger you wont have to worry about battery life and could really help on those long journeys or if you do a lot of work/travel allows you to work from your motor.

Available soon, the 3 Mobile in car Wi-Fi kit will cost £59.99 to start, but we haven’t got a price on tariffs or what data allowance you’ll get.

Bigfoot has just released its Killer Xeno PCIe gaming network that aims to improve your frames per second and pings.

It is basically a mini computer by itself that does all the work required by being powered by a Linux-derived distro.

It is compatible with virtually any PCIe slot, boasting a native PCI-E chip with support for voice-chat acceleration.

The odler Bigfoot Killer NIC was reviewed by IGN and they did find the card bumped the framerate on the bundled F.E.A.R. from 74 to 86 fps, and the ping went from an average of 67ms to 45ms.

It is arguable just how much use this card would be as your pings will likely be more effected by your ADSL and the quality of your wiring.

Considering the Xeno costs $130 and $180 for the 128MB RAM and 256MB RAM, respectively you may find if you are building a new PC that it is better spent putting the money towards a better graphics card.

However if you have money to burn and already have the best graphics card then I am sure this card will providing that extra boost you are looking for.

There has been a lot of discussion and rumours of Virgin launching its 50Mbps ADSL product recently.

Virgin Media has started a viral campaign of the new product showing off the new cable modem/router they will be supplying.

While this may indicate the new service will be arriving any time soon Think Broadband previously announced that the roll out will take to April 2009 to complete and around 40% of us will have a choice of a 50Meg product by then.

Price wise it is said to cost £52 but this is unconfirmed and you will also have to sign up to a 12 month contract.

It will be interesting to see what the upload speeds are like. I find this speed becoming more and more important recently so a 50 meg down and 0.5 meg up would be a bit pointless.

It is also worth noting that cable does not suffer the same problems as ADSL when you move away from the exchange, however user congestion does play a part in the speeds.

Recently we reported that cracking WPA and WPA2 could be speeded up by 100 fold using two GeForce GTX280’s per workstation. However the practicality of this for your every day hacker is not very realistic.

Security researchers are now saying they have refined an existing WPA crack, making it more efficient that earlier reports.

Erik Tews will appear at PacSec security conference in Tokyo next week with a presentation named "Gone in 900 seconds: Some Crypto issues with WPA." where he will show off his findings in TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) cracking, that allow WPA to be broken in a brief 12-15 minute window.

Apparently once TKIP is initialised the Pairwise Master Key (PMK) can be obtained. Normally the hacker would then have to use a brute force dictionary attack, which is slow and crude.

Tews and his partner Martin Beck have discovered a "mathematical breakthrough" that allows the WPA encryption to be cracked dramatically faster. Some of the tools Tews and Beck used are rumoured to have been already included in Aircrack-ng WEP/WPA PSK cracking tool.

It is unlikely that this hacking technique will cause any issues in the near future, and certainly not a problem for average Joe and his home wireless router.

Over the past few years WEP encryption has been on the decline thanks to the serious security flaws associated with it allowing people to crack the encryption within minutes. This has led to more and more people using WPA and WPA2 to secure their wireless networks.

Russian security company Elcomsoft have posted a press release detailing a new method to cracking the increasingly popular WPA and WPA2 stating:

With the latest version of Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery, it is now possible to crack WPA and WPA2 protection on Wi-Fi networks up to 100 times quicker with the use of massively parallel computational power of the newest NVIDIA chips. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery only needs a few packets intercepted in order to perform the attack.

The 100-fold increase in speed is achieved with two GeForct GTX280’s per workstation, you can build a network of 20 workstations dedicated to “recovering” your “lost” WPA keys. This means that a WPA or WPA2 key could be cracked in days or weeks instead of years.

Granted this is never likely to be an issue for home users, though it could cause issues for a company using Wi-Fi.

It is worth noting that the main cause of concern would be a company using a static key. Also keys should not use English words but an alphanumeric string.

Via: securityandthe.net