WiTopia Blog

As many of you may know, Pandora, the very innovative music streaming service, has been forced to restrict its service to U.S. users (and even that is on shaky ground) due to licensing issues. More precisely, its no-fee access model doesn’t afford it sufficient revenue to pay the royalties fees demanded by the various copyright enforcement entities.

Most countries were systematically cut off from Pandora service beginning in May, but the folks at Pandora continued to try to work out a deal for the UK. Unfortunately, Pandora will be forced to pull the plug in the UK on January 15 (today).

This just doesn’t seem right.

Now, I never could justify pirating or benefiting from it. Just because technology makes something easy to steal doesn’t mean it is okay to do. Granted, “Big Media” with their hordes of lawyers, history of exploitation, unchecked greed, and high-margin, yet often crappy product all wrapped up in an environment-poisoning over-marketed package is despicable in many ways. They definitely need to stop the digital witch-hunt, come to terms with the fact that the Internet is here to stay, embrace it, and rethink.

Still, a core issue is (to me at least) is that when you hurt the suits, you also hurt the artists. This applies to writers, actors, software designers, and all the hardworking folks who earn their livelihood creating products that are, unfortunately, easily copied and distributed illegally. Let’s get real. Stealing is not a political statement anymore…if it ever was. The point has been made. You just didn’t want to pay for it.

It’s a confusing issue. Even Trent Reznor isn’t sure what to do anymore. Still, I’d guess that between Trent, Radiohead, Steve Jobs, and a player to be named later (I am sure) it’ll get figured out.

Wow..did I get off topic. I have a bad cold and I must remember to write BEFORE I take NyQuil. Mmmmm..cherry.

My point is Pandora is different. Pandora is not stealing music files. Pandora is not a threat to terrestrial or satellite radio. Pandora, in fascinating and entertaining fashion, diagnoses why you may like music you already listen to and introduces you to music that has similar qualities. Succinctly, Pandora makes you want to BUY music!! The ultimate soft sell.

Also overlooked is that Pandora shortens the time to that sale while simultaneously broadening your musical horizons because it is constantly introducing new artists to you and refining what you like and why. This would take you a long time to figure out on your own…if ever.

Pandora is a music-marketing machine. Instead of cutting Pandora off, the music industry should be throwing cash at them.
So, I’m going to do the music industry a favor that they are too close-minded to do on their own. We’re going to enable Pandora for International users, U.K. and otherwise. WiTopia’s personalVPN service allows Pandora access from all cut off countries because we furnish a U.S. IP address. This is Pandora’s current requirement.

Even better, when the VPN is active, you cannot be tracked by your ISP (or anyone else) because all traffic is encrypted and our IP address and DNS servers are used, not your ISP’s.

I realize some enterprising folks are setting up web proxies for this, but proxies tend to be slower than VPNs, are more easily blocked, and do not provide all the other security benefits, especially with non-browser applications. They are more one-trick ponies. Still, we're all on the same team. Just saying. Read up on it yourself.

If you access Pandora via Sonos or Slimbox, the VPN should work too. Feel free to share any config tricks.

Let the music play.

Being an entrepreneur can be tough. True, you bid farewell to rush hours, idiot bosses, cubicles, shaving daily, and other negatives of corporate life.... but it's not all hanging out at Starbucks with your iPhone.

In addition to the loss of regular paychecks, sick days, and subsidized health insurance (especially an issue in the U.S.), you deal with a lot of rejection. The rejection is harder too because, as an entrepreneur, the potential partner, dissatisfied customer, or media person is rejecting "you" in a much more direct sense. After all, it's "your" company or idea they are dissing (or not calling you back about) , not some ill-conceived brainchild of some out-of-touch exec that you can distance yourself from emotionally as you push it out there. Granted, the latter isn't much fun either, but it's not as personal.

That's why it's particularly uplifting when positive things happen that you weren't expecting. The e-mail from a customer thanking you for a great service. The "Oh, I know (or better yet, use) you guys!" when you mention your company to a stranger. Or, due to it's power to help your business, the mother of all bluebirds, the unsolicited positive article. This is especially sweet when the source is held in high esteem.

Therefore, I was especially blown away when I saw that James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly wrote a wonderful piece on personalVPN titled, "The Best $39.99 I have spent in China"

An excerpt (okay, a big one):

A VPN (which, in effect, lets you tunnel beneath the Great Firewall
and use the internet as if you were based somewhere in the outside
world) solves this problem. So over the last year I've been using a
variety of VPNs, including one from my company in America and another
that a friend in a Chinese company has graciously let me use.**

But neither of them spared me a different problem: the huge SLOWNESS
penalty that the Great Firewall imposes on the internet in China. This
was an issue in Shanghai and a potential crisis after we moved to
Beijing. Even when using my existing VPNs, in the last week I found
that via the internet from my new apartment it could take two or three minutes for a typical web page from a site outside China to open. Outlook often just timed out when trying to collect my email.

For reasons I'm not sure of, the WiTopia VPN has had a miraculous
effect, speeding up the same connection by what seems like a factor of
ten. (Yes, I've run side-by-side tests, going to one site with the VPN
turned off, then another a minute later with the VPN turned on.) It
wasn't that my whole apartment building was working off a single
1200-baud dialup connection, as it seemed! It was just the Great
Firewall, with the various filters and delay cycles it imposes on all
transmissions. And of course this VPN also copes with the related
Wikipedia/Blogger headaches.

Thank you, James. You made some WiTopians very happy!

Many of you know we were working on this and thank you for being beta testers. As covered by MacWorld we've now formally launched WiTopia's PPTP VPN service to run alongside our openVPN based SSL VPN service. The service will be known as personalVPN™ - PPTP. Catchy!

Due to the sales success of the iPhone (and my personal unnatural love of my own iPhone) we decided to primarily focus the marketing of the PPTP VPN service to iPhone users. We are not too proud to try and piggyback on Apple's success.

With over a million iPhone sales in U.S. and the upcoming iPhone launches in UK, Germany, France...not to mention the over 250,000 unlocked iPhones already floating out there as another indicator... this seems like a good strategy.

We at WiTopia are by no means disrespecting our Windows and Linux brothers, though. Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux machines as well as many smartphones have built-in PPTP VPN clients that are compatible with our new VPN service.

And, for a limited time, every new or returning customer will receive a year of free PPTP VPN service with WiTopia along with their personalVPN™ (SSL) service. Not a bad deal for $39.99 a year.

PPTP is VERY easy to set up as it doesn't use certificates or require a software client to be installed on your system. If you're a real deal security snob, you'll still appreciate the delicious complexity and power of the openVPN based service, but the PPTP service is pretty slick and nice to have. It's what most of our "competitors" use, actually. 

Anyways, give it a try and enjoy!

We brought several additional servers online tonight. A few of you have mentioned decreased performance at certain times on the SSL VPN so this might help. Although our monitoring of bandwidth and server capacity always showed we had plenty to spare, more servers can never hurt. 

It is more likely the performance issues may have to do with poor/saturated peering between ISPs somewhere between you and us, a brief "perfect storm" of bandwidth hogging on a specific server (you know who you are), a routing issue, dns issue, or many other things not directly within our control but that should all be temporary.

We're so very happy (almost teary-eyed in fact) that so many of you are renewing. We really started a growth spurt a little over a year ago as word got around ( and, of course, the Superbowl ad) and we are truly grateful. We haven't tracked churn and renewal rates very scientifically at this point, but I see lots of familiar names in the orders queue and the growth in orders certainly reflects the boost.

We apologize that "renewing" is pretty much re-ordering currently and we commit to slickifying this at some point. Some of this is for good reason --certificates, no desire to hold your personal banking information on a server, etc.-- but we need to do a better job with this.

The Mac VPN renewals are not so bad and we will soon have a Windows VPN installer package  that wil make this much easier for Windows users. The step after that, will be more of a "portal" approach where a customer's WiTopia services will be viewable with a master login and renewals will be more point and click.

We'll get there.

I'm not sure if Vista is Microsoft's subtle yet effective revenge for the anti-trust scrutiny it endures or what. You'd have to be a little technical to understand why I would think that, but it is based in reality I assure you.

We're past the scary Microsoft warnings you get when you install the openVPN software (that personalVPN™ is based on) on a Windows machine because it isn't "Microsoft-certified". We've gotten over secret Windows firewall issues, disappearing toolbar icon bugs, and the fact that Windows accounts for 97% of our support tickets, but only 60% of our customers. okay..I made those numbers up, but trust me..there is a huge difference. Hell, I'd forget we had Mac or Linux customers if they didn't ask about renewing, etc. We live to support Windows customers.

But, we worked through it and XP..not so bad. We figured it out and oh..how I miss those days. I was so young and naive.

Vista says you're the administrator of your machine, but you're really not. User Account Control takes away most of your admin rights. This screwed us up at first, but we figured it out. The 329 versions of Vista. ok. no problem. we figured it out. Our test machines all installed perfectly, but seemingly identical customer machines didn't. no prob. We figured it out.

But recently it seems that for some customers (victims of some covert windows update I'm sure), Certificate Wizard installs the files in some buried directory. and, of course, try as we might, we can never get this to occur on our test machines.

But, we're figuring it out.

If this happens to you, write support@witopia.net and they'll fix it.

p.s. we're working on a fairly slick installer that should stop all these shenanigans once and for all. I hope.

Our SecureMyWiFi™ service allows small businesses (really, any size network for special pricing) to deploy WPA-Enterprise Wi-Fi security and management fast and cheap. Although most wireless routers/APs have the ability to support this enhanced security, it requires additional systems to achieve. This is a very complex and potentially quite expensive undertaking.

So… we built an Enterprise-grade implementation of those systems, host them on the Internet, and effectively lease them to you for hardly any cost at all. Plus, we give you a great web interface to manage your network and users and provide technical support. What’s not to like?

Okay…but how does it work and how is it technically different than what a Wi-Fi user can set up by themselves (or purchase from a less than ethical service company) like WEP or WPA-personal/PSK?

Our CTO responded to this question recently and I thought his answer (although technical) was a good one to explain the multiple layers of security

WiTopia’s brand of WPA-Enterprise performs:

The way RADIUS authentication works (really, what the 802.1x, 802.11i, and WPA/WPA2- Enterprise specs requires) is a 3rd party authenticator (i.e. RADIUS server) that is used to store user credentials.

Here’s a brief summary of the way the authentication works, for every request:

1. The Access Point (AP) gets a request from a client.

2. The AP sends the unique shared secret & identifies itself to the RADIUS server as an authorized device to get “permission” to authenticate the user.

3. Once the AP is “approved”, it then sends an inner & outer authentication request to the RADIUS server.

The outer request is just “junk” and the inner identity is the real username/password combo. The outer request uses MS-CHAPv2 to establish link, then the inner uses Protected EAP or (PEAP) to encrypt the real username/password.

4. If approved, the RADIUS server sends “approved” back to the AP and allows the user onto the wireless network. If not approved, the client is rejected and cannot connect.

All of this takes place in a matter of a second or two. Speed of light, baby.

Once on, all wireless traffic between the user and the AP is encrypted. The encryption when using WPA-Enterprise is TKIP and when using WPA2-Enterprise, it’s AES, the strongest encryption widely available today. Theoretically, it would take millions of years to crack.

WiTopia’s systems will also empower the AP to regularly rotate the network keys. With WPA-Enterprise, the rotated key is unique for every USER, a big difference over PSK or just plain WEP where the key is static (WEP) or is shared by all users (PSK/Personal). Even if a “hacker” were to somehow decipher the “key” of an individual user, by the time it’s broken, the “locks” have been changed and the key no longer works.

Thisis kind of a tired subject to many but there is still a LOT of misinformation out there on how to secure a wireless network. This includes many deliberately misleading claims. I’ve seen puh-lenty of Wi-Fi access points and routers advertising they have the “strongest” security available –"WPA".

Upon closer investigation, you find out that they only support WPA-PSK (also known as WPA-Personal). That’s still just the pre-shared key (PSK) version of wi-fi security…NOT WPA-Enterprise which requires a RADIUS server and is, indeed, the top of the heap when it comes to securing a wi-fi network. There is no debate on that despite what claims are made on boxes at Best Buy.

Remember, unless it says one of these: 802.1x, 802.11i, WPA-Enterprise, WPA-RADIUS, WPA-EAP or something involving a RADIUS server..it’s not the real deal.

With the alphabet soup of terms, it’s easy to see why this is so confusing.

WiTopia’s SecureMyWiFi™ does, indeed, provide RADIUS-backed WPA-Enterprise security to wi-fi access points that are capable of supporting it. Many consumer-grade routers do, such as the Linksys WRT54G, and all professional grade access points do. It is absolutely the strongest Wi-Fi security available and what large businesses, governments, and the military use…so you should too.

Also, don't be fooled by these other WiFi security products or services that are really glorified WEP, WPA-personal or just mask your SSID. MAC address filtering also does not work ultimately as MAC addresses are very easy to spoof.

You can do all the above yourself anyway and don’t need to buy anything from anyone to enable them.

The strongest Wi-Fi security has to involve a RADIUS server. If it doesn’t, it’s not as strong as it could be so don’t bother buying it no matter how they mask it or elude the question.

So I don’t mislead as well, for a home user, the personal version of WPA can be made pretty secure by using a long random character passphrase and swapping this out ever so often. That avoids the primary vulnerability in the protocol — that it’s susceptible to what they call a “dictionary attack”.

For a business, you really need to go the WPA-Enterprise route though. Not only for the extra authentication and security layer a RADIUS server will add, but the ability to give every employee and visitor a separate password that you can track logins and revoke at will without changing everyone else's.

With WPA-personal, everyone has to share one password. Obviously, this is a less than spectacular idea security-wise and a general pain in the _ every time you need to change it or give it out to a visitor, etc.

If setting up and maintaining a RADIUS server doesn't sound like a party...you may want to give us a shout.

Greetings,

Well, I could just say that we're late to the blogging game, and most likely get away with it, but that would be a lie. We actually had a blog for a couple years but I so woefully neglected it that I thought it a bit embarassing. So I declared "Blog Bankruptcy" and started anew.

There are lots of reasons for this. Some of them are even good reasons.

Nevertheless, right or wrong, I decided to just take a mulligan and start over. I don't even play golf but I like that expression and always thought I would be a good golfer if I played golf, so I use it.

So, that's where we are. For those of you that were riveted to this blog, waiting for every new posting, every 4 months or so , I am sorry. I'm going to do better this time and not worry about whether my posts suck or not. They probably will.

I also just want to say that although I am co-founder and CEO of WiTopia, and this is WiTopia's "corporate" blog, I and I alone am responsible for the content and it doesn't reflect what everyone thinks here or our official corporate position. If you heard some of the political debates we have when we're supposed to be working you would realize rather quickly that "that" would be impossible.