Thursday, May 31, 2007

Amsterdam and Security?

The last two days I was visiting Amsterdam for a consultancy job. I visited as well the HQ of McAfee Netherlands to have a good chat with my friends George Doukatelis and Marius van Oers. When I arrived at my hotel I was asking for a wireless internet connection. 'It's not a problem' told the receptionist. 'It will cost you 5 Euro's for each hour as it was not included in the price of your room.' I rejected and wanted to find out if I could find maybe some other open connections. You guessed it: over 50 connections could be found at my hotel room with about 25 open (unprotected) wireless connections. So the internet connection was very cheap for me or my company... well I didn't try anything bad of course ... but it's indeed terrible. I tried to walk up on the street where I did find loads of other open connections. It seems that Amsterdam is not only well known for the openess about sex but also for the wide open wireless connections: the real hacker's paradise in my opinion. In the evening I went to a nice Michelin Guide recommended restaurant (see picture) with fair prices. I must say that I personally also recommend this good restaurant to anybody visiting Amsterdam. It's called 'Het TuynHuys' and it's located at the Reguliersdwarsstraat 28. And you can even pickup over there open wireless connections...sigh.