Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

It is criminal in my opinion for gaming devices, which are ever more popular, to support such lowly encryption methods as only WEP - which has been thoroughly hacked over and over again and is useless. All WEP encryption will stop is the man sitting outside your house in his car, typing away on his laptop, not even that really if he has any sense he can crack the key in under 15 minutes.

Related to this is the Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP’s support of only 802.11b. The 802.11g protocol had been aroung long before the release of these devices yet they didn’t see fit to support this higher bandwidth protocol.

I argue that security features like this are far more important than parental controls. Having to downgrade one’s wireless security setup to something inferior such as WEP to have it supported by all devices is a terrible situation akin to being between a rock and a hard place. Do you want to lose functionality or do you want to lose security - you simply should never be put in this position by a responsible company. If this was a business grade product then it would not have been tolerated.

At least the Nintendo Wii supports WPA2-PSK (AES) but it’s far from an ideal situation. You have to sacrifice speed of the overall network to run in mixed mode and not 802.11g only mode.

Why is it that I have to provide a specific, non-universal student ID card in order to gain services. Such as: discounts at high street retailers, Odeon Cinemas and now MacDonalds for free Wi-Fi.

I mean, we all know why, they’re limiting the amount of people who are eligible as heaven forbid they see an increase in sales because of their offer. Or should I say, their limited offer.

It’s bad enough that the Aylesbury College as standard get NUS cards whereas to my experience, the Aylesbury High School and Aylesbury Grammar School do not. So all through my career in the Grammar, I was not able to access these things even though in every sense of the word I was in full-time education - a student!

What am I now? I am in part-time education because my school would not let me go back, still no NUS card, still any less of a student? Well I still don’t qualify for free Wi-Fi. Even if you do have an NUS card, most places will not accept the inferior, free card that is handed out by mysterious colleges and educational institutions. Only a £7 NUS Extra card will do. Stop extorting me. There should be as little red tape, small print as possible. I was about to praise MacDonalds UK for starting this initiative away from their previous one with BT and The Cloud.

Instead, for once, for a limited but extended period of time the Aylesbury Study Centre, formally the Aylesbury Reference Library, despite budget cuts that are clear and ever-present they give me free Wi-Fi. Do I need any proof? Perfect.

Definie a student.