The “Break it Down” Blog

How to Fix the Xbox 360 “MTU Too Low” Problem with the Qwest Actiontec Q1000 DSL Modem

NOTE: If you are coming to this article after Googling the subject in frustration, here’s the quick-fix for you: Upgrade the modem’s firmware to QAQ01-31.00L.33 or later and you should be fine. Qwest has been rolling their new high-speed fiber-optic DSL service out throughout Denver and Arizona for the last year or so (it’s not fiber-to-the-house, [...]

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Panasonic Set to Release New Powerline Adapters at CES

PCWorld reports that Panasonic has announced they will be debuting some new Powerline devices at CES this year (in less than 2 days!). We can only hope that these new powerline adapters are the HomePlug Powerline AV II spec-compliant devices that we’ve been waiting for… for like 2 years. The hope being that the Powerline AV [...]

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NETGEAR Releases XAVB101 & HDXB111 200 Mbps Powerline Adapters

We have been waiting for revised, higher performance Ethernet-over-Powerline adapters since our “How to build a high performance Powerline home network” article in June of 2007. It seems that after the initial HomePlug 1.0 spec which was a 4 or 7 Mbps spec, things were going quick. We got the HomePlug 1.1 spec that bumped [...]

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WPA Wi-Fi Encryption Cracked

I guess it was only a matter of time utnil someone found a quick way to break WPA Wi-Fi Encryption.  Erik Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key used by WPA in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes.  So far [...]

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Virgin Media, Worst Than Comcast?

In the recent past it seems that Comcast has become the favorite ISP to hate with their constant manipulation of your traffic, illegal traffic tampering (OOPS, wait, nothing is illegal under Bush admin if done by a big enough corporation, full pardons all around!) and a general all around level of shit service… but it [...]

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