> You need to run a VPN on top of the wireless connection. This will > give you a secure tunnel from your computer through to the VPN server. > See a good tutorial at www.cites.uiuc.edu/vpn/security.html
The above web site has a couple of nice graphics showing what part of the communication stream is protected by the encrypted tunnel. The tunnel is between the VPN client on your machine to the VPN server at the _VPN_service_provider's_end_. However, if the final service you are trying to reach is outside of the VPN provider's network, then the traffic from that point on are going unencrypted. Sniffers at any point beyond that can eavesdrop. > You can buy VPN as a service from various providers for about > $12/month. To mention one: www.hotspotvpn.com. (This is just an > example, I have not used this service.) I think, a service like this will give you a false sense of security since you will be using this VPN tunnel to get to, in this case, hotspotvpn.com's network, but traffic beyond that is unencrypted and on regular the internet. You need to use the https protocol (as opposed to just http) every time when you give out a username/password pair for a web service you want to use. If the web service you intend to use does not offer https, then treat is an non-secure service. A lot of people still use FTP to upload web pages. You need to use sftp or scp instead. (Windows clients: Putty, WinSCP; MacOSX and Linux have scp, ssh, sftp build-in via the Terminal or you can find GUI clients.) Don't use the same username/password pair for all of your accounts. If one is compromised (ie: via FTP mentioned above) you are at the risk of having all of your accounts being compromised. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
