Wireshark

After downloading and installing the Wireshark software the first website I went to was Google since it is a relatively simple interface. The first thing I notice was the source/destination back and forth listed. One was 74.124.155.103 which I was able to confirm was Google's by pinging their website and the other one I assumed was used by Buffalo Wild Wings probably through cable vision.

After looking around a bit I noticed ACK in one of the packets and looked into the packet and noticed that "Acknowledgment was set.



This prompted me to look at one of the red entries and noticed that it had the RST designation and the reset flag was set.



Two other designations that I noticed were the SYN and FIN flags:



and



Here's a good summery of all the TCP flags.

One other thing I looked at was the protocol column. The DNS entries had an interesting IP of 4.2.2.?. After a WHOIS search I found out the name of the provider and what I found was of interest to me personally. Not only did I live withing a few miles of the DNS's headquarters years ago but I recently live within a few blogs of their controlling company.

I visited a few other sites with similar results but more clutter and then it dawned on me that I had an old installer .exe on my desktop and ran that. The results were predictable but interesting.



The output was massive even though I stopped it about a quarter of the way through. It pretty much connected with the destination and started swapping packets after that with random blocks of resets.

Overall, I think Wireshark is a useful tool even though I don't understand much of what is going on with it. But that is why I signed up for this course so I hope to be able to make better use of it as we progress through the semester.

Assignment 2, HTML and eMail Traces

Looking Inside your HTTP Packets:

The first site I visited was CNN.com because of the size of content and popularity. No surprise that they use Apache and the HTML returned was massive.

The second site I visited was Google. I was expecting to see some sort of server designed by Google and again wasn’t surprised. They use Google Web Server which according to it’s wikipedia page is the most popular web server software behind Microsoft and Apache though it is far behind the two.

The third site was Blogger where I post my assignments. I expected to see the GWS software since it is owned by Google but it came back with GFE/2.0. After doing a search for this I found out it stands for Google Front End and is used for Blogger, Gmail, Docs, and Picasa among other things.

"Tracing your E-mail"

The first email I traced was an order confirmation that I received from eTrade last week. Their corporate office is in NYC but the trace showed that the email came from Jersey City, NJ to St. Joseph through KCMO and Overland Park, KS. A web search shows that they have a financial center in Jersey.

The Second email I traced was entitled “Nude Teens attack” which apparently is a warning of a coming nude teen revolution. It took a long trip from Singapore:



The third email I traced was sent from my school email to my gmail account and took a longer route than I thought it would:

Apple rejected Google Voice for the iPhone (or did they). What really is going on here?

Google Voice is a telecommunication application/service provided by Google that grew out of the acquisition of the VoIP company GrandCentral. Launched in March of 2009 Google Voice provides a free way to use a single number provided by Google for all the user’s phone numbers. In addition Google Voice provides several other features with this service such as, among others, low cost international calling, call forwarding, the ability to read transcribed voice mails online, and conference calling.

While the Google Voice application has been made available to Blackberry users and users of Google’s own Android Smartphones in July of 2009 Apple appeared to reject the Google Voice application for their iPhone. Apple clarified the situation by explaining that the application had not been rejected but had been delayed for further review. The official reasoning for doing this is that Apple had concerns over Google Voice’s ability to alter or replace the iPhones functions and interface. While this may be part of the reason for the delay I think a bigger part of this is the partnership between Apple and service provider AT&T. AT&T is the sole provider for the iPhone and has an interest in keeping Google Voice off of the iPhone.

Even though Apple has assured AT&T had not given it’s opinion either way I find that hard to believe. AT&T has much to lose by allowing Google to provide this application. Mainly, they don’t want competition with the services they already provide to a superior Google product and they certainly don’t want to provide the bandwidth for Google to accomplish this (a complaint they share with other apps like Pandora and Slingbox).

Apple is under no obligation to allow Google to boost their popularity by using Apple and AT&T’s technology but what this shows is a failure on AT&T’s part to provide a competing service that is desired by their customers. Time will tell if it was a good move to keep Google Voice from iPhone users in its current form. If a similar app can eventually be developed to compete with Google Voice it could turn out to be a good move. If they can’t develop a similar app or of they force Google to trim down what they have developed before they allow it on the iPhone they may find a portion of their customers moving on to different devices that offer the applications that they desire.