How to keep your Free WiFi session private.

So, you are really digging the free WiFi in Panera or Hooters or your hotel, but did you know that most of the traffic you send is viewable by some guy in the corner with a sniffer? I'm not talking about any websites you use where the address (URl) starts with https. Those are fine *You do make sure you use GMail or Yahoo Mail with https right?). I am talking about things like AIM and MSN as well as anyone that is still using unsecured Outlook Express or some other POP mail client. All this data is easily viewable by someone else in the vicinity. So, how do you secure this? Well, there is an answer and it sort of depends on your ISP setup. There are products you can use for a fee like GoTrusted Secure Tunnel (I have not used it so that's not a recommendation) If you have an ISP like XMission, you may be able to use a shell account. I use XMission for a basic website, some email and the shell server. There are some steps to doing this but basically, you do the following:

• Get a shell account (XMission charges $10/month or $100 per year).
• Download an ssh client (I like Tunnelier from BitVise - Free for personal use)
• Get the address of your ISPs proxy server (proxy.xmission.com for example)
• Get the port information for the proxy (usually 8080)
• Setup Tunnelier with a tunnel on the C2S Forwarding Tab
• The local host is 127.0.0.1 port 8080 and the destination is your proxy (proxy.yourisp.com) port 8080
• Connect with your user and password on the login tab
• Go to your browser and tell it to use a proxy and point it to localhost as the proxy server and port 8080

Now, this configuration may change depending upon several factors. The thing to remember is that you are creating a server on your local system (localhost) to listen for any data on port 8080. Tunnelier will take any data it gets on port 8080 and send that to the proxy.yourisp.com port 8080. This in turn will send the data to the Internet.

You can also configure AIM, or another instant messenger to connect to the Proxy. Note that this should always work from a free WiFi site, but it may even work from within a company network. This would mean you could browse the web anonymously. I am not suggesting you do this to avoid working, but if you have a need to test a web site from outside, this is a good solution too.

If you have a different configuration and are having trouble, please let me know and I will see if I can help you out (subject to me doing actual work too :) ).

Good luck