Chris Boyd
Right now as I’m writing this I’m about to board JetBlue Flight 620 to JFK. Like several other people, I’m using the airport’s free WIFI access point to get onto the internet. Free, public WIFI is something that’s become somewhat of an expected luxury in the 10′s. I’m rarely in a place that isn’t near some sort of open WIFI network.
While this is great, and certainly one of the benefits of living in the supercool future world that we do, it has a downside. On the same network, wireless or otherwise, traffic can be easily intercepted using a number of tools such as Wireshark or Ethereal. This means that anyone on the same open wireless network that you’re on can see the bytes that are being transmitted to and from your machine.
Generally speaking, this isn’t a big deal because A.) Not everyone is a gigantic nerd and B.) Most of your sensitive data is transferred over SSL. Right? But these days, more and more nerds are created every day. And nerds are nosy. And creepy.
The good news is there are ways to prevent that creepy guy sitting near you at Starbucks from reading your email. There’s something called SSH that you can use to create a secure tunnel for your traffic, and there’s a tool for Macintosh called Sidestep that makes turning on a secure tunnel super duper easy.
Once installed, it will detect whenever you’ve signed on to an unsecured wireless network, and turn on SSH tunneling if it determines that you have. It’s easy to turn tunneling on and off through an icon in the menu bar. Hats off to Chetan Surpur for this excellent utility and a really easy, simple approach to SSH tunneling. Best of all, it’s free.
See? The future isn’t that scary after all. Too bad you read this after you sent that nude photo to your significant other, right?
Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.
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This software looks great. It’s a step in the right direction for your average computer user, but it’s still falls just a little short. If I had to tell any of my non-techie family to use this software, I think most of them would figure out how… all the way up until I said “Oh, and you need a proxy server”.