Wallstreet + Wireless + OS 9

Question

Hi guys,
I have just bought a Powerbook Wallstreet, and am wondering what Wireless PCMCIA cards will work in OS 9, as looking on eBay only brings up Windows compatible ones and Sonnettechs own one says it only supports OS X.
So what cards can people suggest?
TIA
Craig

Answer 1

Craig,
Yes, the Orinoco Silver will work just fine. The Silver has 64-bit WEP encryption and the Orinoco Gold has 128-bit.
Here is just a brief overview of encryption:
http://css.psu.edu/news/nlfa03/hotoffwire.html
WEP encryption. WEP stands for "Wired Equivalent Privacy," and is a method of encrypting the packets passing between wireless clients and the access point so that potential spies will have a hard time looking at what's in your network traffic. Note that I said "have a hard time," and not "can't." WEP encryption can be broken (though it's by no means a trivial task). For the average home user, it's pretty unlikely that anyone would bother investing the considerable time and effort required to eavesdrop on you, but you should be aware that even the best current wireless encryption isn't 100% spy-proof.
There are two commonly-used types of WEP encryption, 64-bit and 128-bit. These refer to the lengths of the encryption key supplied by the user. (As a side note, you will also see references to "40-bit" keys. They are functionally identical to 64-bit keys, since the wireless hub itself supplies the extra 24 bits—which are called the initialization vector. Likewise, "128-bit" keys are actually 104 bits plus 24 bits of initialization vector. Aren't you glad you know that?)
You can think of these encryption keys as passwords (though they're actually quite a lot more than that) that you'll have to enter from your client machine each time you connect to the access point.
Creating these keys is often a baffling and frustrating process for the novice. Some access point setup utilities let you enter them as ordinary ASCII characters, while others want to see hex characters--requiring you to have a hex-to-ASCII conversion table (easily available with a quick web search) handy.
In either case, the number of characters is important. A 40/64-bit key is five ASCII characters. An example would be "R011$". A 128-bit key is thirteen ASCII characters, for example "MyC0mputerB0x". Obviously, the longer key is the harder one to crack.