Maximum PC

When I was growing up in the ’60s, it was common for teenagers to tinker with their cars. You know, tune them up, adjust the timing, tweak the carburetor, anything to get some extra horsepower. Then it was time to race, to see who was the best and the baddest. Well, those days are in the past and long gone. Today, most automobiles are computer controlled, and it’s hard to tinker with them. So what is a person to do? To me, it was easy. I started tinkering with my computer. And, thanks to the help provided in Maximum PC Minimum BS, it gets easier all the time.

The online version of Maximum PC Magazine, it has as its intended audience people who are interested in more than just a computer box. It is for those who are interested in looking under the hood, seeing what is there, and possibly playing around with it.

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Enabling WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy - is the second-most important thing you can do to stymie would-be wireless freeloaders. WEP isn’t 100 percent secure, but cracking the encryption technology isn’t a trivial exercise. In fact, it presents more trouble than most common bandwidth thieves are willing to wrestle with. First things first: If your access point and your Wi-Fi card support 128-bit encryption, use 128-bit encryption. A 128-bit key can indeed be cracked, but even under perfect circumstances, a cracker will have to sniff packets from your wireless network for six or more hours in order to get enough data to generate a WEP key. And we repeat: That’s in an ideal situation. It can actually take days or longer to sniff enough packets to crack a 128-bit key.