Gossip

... dreaming of a Xircom rogue access point in Copenhagen

What can this mean? How on earth would someone imagine they could get away with defrauding the fairly priced wireless Internet service so generously provided by the airport?

But if they thought they could, how would they do it?

Your Sniffer isn't an expert on this, of course. But it is rumoured that The Boss saw something like this in Copenhagen. If you wanted to do it, you would probably

1) take a band of cynical hacks and delay their flight to London

2) get one of the truculent scribblers to connect on his Unix laptop (hint: Macs are Unix, these days)

3) admire the chorus of disbelieving: "How much are you paying!?" from the other hacks.

4) bully the poor chap into turning on Internet sharing.

All you need then, is a way of connecting to his computer. Like, a cable from his computer to the Ethernet port of another. Enter chorus "Oy! What about us?" from other hacks.

At this point (you might suppose) another of the jaded journos might produce an antique Xircom wireless access point. Why would anybody carry one around? "For just this sort of eventuality," he might say.

And next thing you know, a half dozen veterans of Copenhagen IT Forum are online, and checking their email.

"Oh, dear. I have six meg of email coming in ... "

Fortunately, nobody Sniffer knows would do such a thing, so this is just speculative fiction. But if you did try this, Sniffer recommends you turn off the firewall on the Unix laptop. No reason, no reason ... just speculation that it might spoil the trick.