You Should Replace Your Smoke Detector Every 1. Years. You know that you need to replace your smoke detector’s batteries when they run out, but you might not realize that you should also replace the smoke detector itself every 1. Yes, even your fancy Nest detector falls under this guideline. This might sound like a ploy to get you to shell out for a new alarm every decade, but you’re better off doing it for several reasons: Peace of mind: You’ll know that your home has a working system to alert you in case of fire. You should make sure there’s alarms on each level of your home as well as one within earshot of your bed (many fires start when you’re asleep). Ideally, they’re interlinked so that when one goes off, they all go off so you get as early a warning as possible. Limiting effects to your insurance: If you have a homeowner’s or rental insurance policy, you likely have a section on protections your home must have to qualify for the policy. This often includes having working, non- expired smoke detectors. Even if your policy doesn’t have a section on this, alerting your agent that you have non- expired alarms can sometimes lower your rate or work in your favor during insurance investigations after a fire. Following other regulations: If you’re a landlord, you’re likely required to make sure your rental properties all have working, non- expired smoke detectors. Consumer Reports points out that you can test your smoke alarm’s sensors using a test spray that simulates smoke, but that the best thing is to just replace an alarm that has passed its expiration date. Check for the date by looking for the manufacture date on the underside of your alarm (the part that typically faces the ceiling). Add ten years to that date and you have your expiration date. You might want to write this date on a piece of painter’s tape or on the outside of the alarm so it’s easy for you to see when to pick up a new one. ![]() N600 Wireless Dual Band Router WNDR3400 Setup Manual Getting to Know Your Wireless Router 3 Front Panel You can use the status lights on the front of the wireless. What Are WEP, WPA, and WPA2? Which Is Best? WEP vs WPA vs WPA2 - Know Why the Differences Matter Share Pin Email. The Belkin N300 Wi-Fi N Router provides better performance for surfing, downloading, and all your other online activities. Featuring Belkin's Simple Start browser. A wireless bridge connects multiple LANs. Many Wi-Fi bridging products exist, and their functionality can differ from each other substantially. Introduction. This document describes a sample configuration for Wireless Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2 with a pre-shared key (PSK). Prerequisites. I depend on it. The cloud allows me to access my data from any device at any time; from anywhere I have broadband access. And I can share. If you wonder which ones are the worst to use, check out the 25 most common passwords of 2013 and avoid them. ![]() Comcast XFINITY Wi. Fi: Just say no. About a year ago, Comcast started modifying the routers of some of their customers to create a quasi- public wireless system called XFINITY Wi. Fi intended for use, mainly, by Comcast customers. Home users would see a new Wi- Fi network called . They tout it as a security feature, since the homeowner gets to keep their Wi- Fi password secret. Of course, this ignores the fact that many routers offer guest networks to solve just this problem. ![]() ![]() Sagemcom Fast 1704N and Fast 2704N are compact ADSL2+ Wi-Fi residential gateways, optimized for High Speed Internet service.![]() XFINITY Wi- Fi can save on typically limited 3. G/4. G bandwidth and it should be faster too. It may even let someone get away with a cheap Wi- Fi only tablet as opposed to a model with built- in 3. G/4. G/LTE. Either way, Comcast plans to have 8 million by the end of 2. To put this in perspective, Comcast has roughly 2. Internet customers. At Lifehacker, Melanie Pinola recently wrote . Here I will cover the obvious downsides to the service, some less than obvious drawbacks, and finally, a new security risk that no one has yet raised. If you read this entire article to the end (warning: it's long), I am sure you will agree. They also say that . We have provisioned the XFINITY Wi. Fi feature to support robust usage, and therefore, we anticipate minimal impact to the in- home Wi. Fi network. Unlike Wi- Fi channels, DOCSIS channels refer to wired connections between the cable modem and the home office of the cable provider. It is possible that the Comcast gateway devices (Arris Touchstone models in Houston) are configured to send guest traffic over a different channel or channels than traffic from the homeowner. But, to be clear, this is speculation on my part. Addressing this, Comcast says . She writes that . I would be concerned about my address being broadcast by the app or the website. Comcast does address this, but Lynn says . What if a guest, using the Internet connection in your home, does something illegal? Something so bad that law enforcement agencies get involved. This has come up many times before and is, perhaps, the most important reason not to share your home Internet connection. That is, they share a common public IP address (an IP address is the unique number that identifies a single entity on a TCP/IP network). You can see your public IP address at ipchicken. If they are not, anyone offering the service from their home, runs the risk of men with guns knocking on their door. That there are no detailed explanations of how this works, just makes one more doubtful. Bad guys with stolen credit cards can get online for an hour ($2. Bad guys without a credit card can use two free sessions of an hour each. But exactly what that means, they don't say. Likewise, the access passes are not available in all locations. Whether that means you can't buy them everywhere or you can't use them everywhere is, again, not spelled out. The data traffic needs to be separate over the air, in the router and as far as anyone on the Internet can discern. Their FAQ page has one relevant sentence: . None of our business. In part, I was drawn to the subject because of the huge parade of ghastly security flaws in routers. It seems when it comes to router firmware, quality is job 3. If they have flaws, someone is sure to find them. It is the same one used to logon to the Comcast website to manage an account. If a bad guy got hold of it (more on this below) there is a huge potential for abuse. They can add HBO and Cinemax to your account. Worst of all, they can logon to XFINITY Wi. Fi as you, do something illegal and have everything point back to you. Better yet, there should be a Wi- Fi only userid/password for each member of the family. A single userid/password being used for everything is too tempting a target. Afterwards, the system recognizes the device automatically. I suspect, however, that it is a big security flaw. Needless to say at this point, I could find no relevant documentation. But their software is not required. Any wireless enabled device can logon to XFINITY Wi. Fi. So, how might Comcast uniquely identify a particular device? From the start, MAC addresses were designed to be globally unique. The first 2. 4 bits identify the company that made the hardware, the last 2. A dual band router will have a MAC address for each wireless band. You can usually find the MAC addresses of a router on a sticker on the bottom. Based on the first half of the MAC address, the program is able to show which company made the wireless radio for the detected network. Here we see three networks, running on hardware from Belkin, Cisco- Linksys and Arris. The characters after the period are the last three hexadecimal characters of the MAC address. This lets you tell the router the MAC addresses of known trusted Wi- Fi devices. These devices are allowed in, all others get blocked. You can see a demo of configuring MAC address filtering for an Asus router here. No one uses it. The underlying communication protocol requires this. So, anyone who found themselves blocked by a router using MAC address filtering, could just listen for a valid MAC addresses communicating with the target network and then pretend to be that device. The pretending (called spoofing) is not all that hard. Rather than use a free one hour session, a bad guy can park near an xfinitywifi network and make a note of the MAC addresses of the devices using the network. Then all they need to do is fake their MAC address, get automatically signed in, do something illegal, and an innocent Comcast customer is in for all kinds of hell. The VPN will encrypt stuff, but that stuff gets sent to the router in a clump of bits (. At the least, they have over a million hotspots. It's hard to believe that I am the first person to publicly raise this issue.
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