Microsoft security guru Steve Riley says don’t believe everything you read about security on wireless networks:

Hiding an SSID will not hide a wireless network, so ignore any such advice — and it’s amazing how often I continue to see this. By the way, also ignore any advice that says to use MAC address filtering.

Unfortunately, as I learned long ago, it’s nearly impossible to kill bad advice, which tends to take on a life of its own. I just Googled “wireless security” and three of the top five articles included these two bogus tips. Fortunately, item 6 on the list was George Ou’s “The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN”, which debunks these two tips and four others for good measure.

Scott Hanselman explores the Five Second Rule (“…if you drop something on the ground, you can still eat it if you pick it up in five seconds”) And the Line Of Sight Corollary (“extend the Five Second Rule as long as you held the dropped object in your line of sight the entire time”).

I had never considered whether it’s an international phenomenon. Apparently not.

I’m working on a series of projects that will have me heads-down all this week. While I’m otherwise occupied, here’s a question for you:

I’m assuming that most of you have multiple computers, and that you occasionally upgrade hardware or your operating system, requiring activation and validation and other associated licensing activities. And then there’s application software. When I change PCs I have to enter dozens of serial numbers and registration codes and occasionally perform some sort of activation as part of installing programs I own. I’ve described my system for keeping this information organized. But I’m curious: how do you tackle the same task? How do you keep track of serial numbers, license keys, and other essential PC-related information? Which companies are best and worst when it comes to serial numbers and activation?

Long uncovers and extracts this Dark Aurora wallpaper. It’s especially nice because the consistent dark background makes it easy to read icon labels.

I think I change my wallpaper five times a week, usually after snapping a nice photo or stumbling across an old image that I like.

Four or five years ago, as I was working on an update to Windows XP Inside Out, I remember getting into a brief back-and-forth with a colleague over how to describe the price of USB flash drives. I wanted to say that devices of a specific size were available for “reasonable” prices, and my colleague contended that every reader’s circumstances were different, and that “reasonable” meant different things to different people. We wound up calling them “inexpensive.”

OK, here’s the punch line. We were talking about drives that look positively puny now: 64MB drives going for around $50. And we were both impressed a year or so later to discover that some 1GB flash drives (slow, bulky, with nonstandard designs) were finally available for under $100. I still have a handful of those old, small drives hanging around. They’re useful for moving drivers and downloads between machines, but that’s about it.

Roughly a year ago, I picked up some high-performance 1GB drives for $24, which I called a “remarkably low price” back in January. This week, I’ve seen multiple ads offering flash drives with the ReadyBoost logo (meaning they had passed a meaningful speed test): $18 for 2GB , $30 for 4GB, and roughly $50 for 8GB. The 4GB and 8GB sizes are big enough to hold enough entertainment for a cross-country flight: a movie or two, a week’s worth of recorded TV programs, or 100 albums. They’re also considerably easier to use (and more importantly, to reuse) than blank DVD media, which offers the same storage at roughly 1% of the price.

Given the current price-performance curve, I expect to see inexpensive 128GB flash drives within the next five years. At that price, I should be able to store 1000 albums or a dozen high-definition movies on a thumb drive or a hybrid drive I can plug into a notebook. As a consumer, I think that’s pretty cool. If I were an entertainment industry executive, I’d be much more concerned. Either way, it sure does change the definition of “portable.”

I really like what my ZDNet colleague George Ou has done with this custom-built dual-core VESA Stand PC. Personally, I belong in the “hide it in a cabinet or under a desk” school, but that’s probably because I never really got into wood shop.

It could probably use a little finishing work, but all in all, a fine bit of handiwork, and the commenters seem to agree.

If I had a dime for every time someone wrote me a note like this one, I’d have enough for a Starbuck’s triple-shot venti cappuccino with light foam:

I’m having issues with the new machine I just put together, getting Stop 07F. I know the drive and RAM are good, spent 4 hrs doing a full format of the 750gb I’m using and ran mem tests on all 4 GB of RAM. I installed using only 2GB as others has said there is a bug with 4GB until it is patched.

I have ‘nearly’ eliminated all hardware issue. The only possible hardware left is a strange mobo issue. BUT, it actually did a full install on this machine last night.

Then I installed all MS patches, NVidia video drivers and Intel Matrix driver. During boot it puked saying the iastor.sys (Intel matrix driver) is unsigned , boot to the CD and run a repair. Now I’m getting Stop 07F errors like I did during the initial first 6 install attempts.”

Ah, the old Stop 07F error (a subspecies of the Blue Screen of Death). I have never seen a Stop 07F that was not hardware related, and they can be a nightmare to troubleshoot. The fact that this is a new, home-built PC that has never successfully booted to Windows makes it even more likely that the problem is hardware-related. Just as a sanity check, I did a quick search through Windows Vista Inside Out, where I came up with this helpful snippet:

STOP 0x0000007F or UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP

Hardware failure is the most common cause of this error. You are most likely to see this Stop error if you have defective memory chips, mismatched memory modules, a malfunctioning CPU, or a failure in your fan or power supply that causes overheating. The error is especially likely to occur on systems where the CPU has been tweaked to run past its rated speed, a process known as “overclocking.” The first parameter immediately after this Stop error number identifies the specific cause of the error.

For more information, see Knowledge Base article 137539, http://www.vista-io.com/2310.

A bit of back and forth determined that a defective DVD drive was the problem behind this particular Stop error. Strange, but certainly not unheard of. (A defective cable has been known to cause similar problems.) We’ll have to add that little detail when we update this chapter in the next edition.

New at ZDNet: Where do you stand on digital media ethics?

I’m back from vacation, digging through a pile of e-mail and snail mail and more packages than I care to count. Anyway, while I try to find my desk under this mountain of paper, help me wrestle with some ethical questions about the rightness and wrongness of personal actions when it comes to digital media. We can all agree, I think, that it’s easy to make perfect copies of digital media, and that there’s no such thing as an unbreakable copy protection scheme. But the fact that you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Does it?

In that spirit, I’ve posted six questions over at ZDNet. (Like, is it ever OK to buy a CD and burn a copy for a friend? How do you feel about the ethics of ripping copies of DVDs you rent from Netflix?) Help me out by sharing your thoughts in the Talkback section there or in the comments to this post.

I have my own ideas about some of these issues, but I don’t want to prejudice anyone’s answers, so I’ll read comments for a few days before posting a follow-up. OK, have at it.

Blogging will continue to be light until further notice.

Earlier this week I served as a judge in Microsoft’s Code2Fame contest, which gave me the rare pleasure of voting to give away someone else’s money.

I was looking forward to this event because I wanted to see what third-party developers are doing with the Windows Home Server platform, and I wasn’t disappointed. The winner, Andrew Grant, has come up with a free add-in called Whiist, which makes it easy to create custom websites and make them accessible via the web server built into Windows Home Server. The winning feature, for me, was the ability to create a photo album by simply dragging and dropping a folder full of digital pictures.

I’ll be writing more about Windows Home Server when I get back from vacation. Meanwhile, go and read about the winners.