rudis dot net

From the article:

Ronald McDonald is taking off the gloves and brewing the good grind in hopes of supplanting Starbucks as the wireless hangout of choice.
McDonald's promised last week to outfit 14,000 of its locations with upscale coffee bars accompanied by expanded Wi-Fi service as the fast-food chain inches closer to offering the wireless technology free of charge. Currently, McDonald's provides Wi-Fi service to 15,000 of its 30,000 U.S. and international locations. The service is available most often through a credit card purchase or through Internet service provider Wayport.

To help McDonald's goals, Sony Electronics announced Sunday that its Mylo COM-2 communicator users will receive free Wi-Fi service at more than 9,000 McDonald's locations. Wayport, which supplies Wi-Fi service to McDonald's restaurants, said Mylo users will be able to easily log on to the service and won't need even to enter a user name or password.

The announcement comes in the wake of McDonald's October decision to offer free Wi-Fi service at 1,200 locations in the United Kingdom. By expanding Wi-Fi service, combined with its plans to build upscale coffee bars with baristas, McDonald's is moving toward direct competition with Starbucks, which has slightly more than 13,000 U.S. locations.

Those 12 Mylo owners will really hurt the latte sales @ Starbucks, that's for sure. Starbucks is an image thing as well as a halfway-decent-coffee thing. People - for better or worse - equate Starbucks with style! and McDonalds with "cheap". 802.11 and commodity espresso will not help the golden arches steal the cool from the king of lattes.

Having said that, the continuing economic crunch may drive folks to try a McCarmelMachiatto or AmeriMcano, but will it be good enough to capture customers?

If anyone has tried the McDonalds espresso drinks and can compare them against those from Starbucks, drop a note in the comments. I'd be interested to hear if it's worth giving it a shot (heh).

Highly portable routers are nothing new. Apple's Airport Express is a good example of a compact device which seamlessly bridges wi-fi and ethernet with an admin interface almost anyone can use. It's disruptive - small enough to conceal anywhere - but it has a drawback - it requires a physical power connection. It's also limited to wi-fi rage in terms of wireless connectivity.

Enter CradlePoint and their new PHS300 Personal Hotspot, an 802.11b/g access point with the ability to pair with a cell phone for 3G or utilize a USB 3G modem for internet connectivity. While interesting, those features alone do not make the device noteworthy. The killer feature of this package is the lithium ion battery which can power the whole setup. A truly portable wireless internet connection that will let you provide wi-fi to all the other folks stuck on I-5 during the AM/PM rush hour periods.

While the device is cool, I'm interested in a slightly altered configuration where it's a 3G to ethernet bridge with the same battery. Make the configuration/administration simple enough and you've now got a way for anyone to setup remote access into their organization and completely decimate security and network integrity. Great tool for consultants who want to still be there once their contract is up. It's also a great tool for corporate espionage.

NAC (network access control) may be able to save you from this one, if you implement an in-stream solution and have all of your static device assignments up-to-date and restricted to certain protocol profiles. Full network monitoring may help as well, provided you have a comprehensive understanding of all your connection and protocol usage baselines. I know my current and previous corporate network would not be safe from such a device.

If the box I've proposed is made and used on your network, how will you detect it? What will you do to protect your information assets? What tools are out there to help or what do we need to build in order to respond to this new "weapon".

(via MacNN)