Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Previous post on WiFi security - I was at a big broadcaster yesterday discussing a project we're doing for them - one of the senior programme execs was bemoaning the fact that he couldn't use his laptop to get wireless access. The guy from IT explained how "we don't have wireless here as it is so insecure...". He went on to say that to provide secure access would cost "£80k per access point"! I was toying with my PDA and did a quick wireless scan and found three peer-peer wireless networks - two of which allowed me out to the Internet with very respectable throughput. It's the classic example of an IT department forbidding some way of working and because they now provide no support to users when people do implement it themselves they do it badly. The same thing was prevalent years ago when people were forbidden from using email at work - use of Hotmail/Yahoo/etc flourished and now you've got viruses arriving over http where they are less easy to scan than if they came via an email server!
What is it with corporate IT folks?

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