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You have just bought tickets to an exotic vacation spot. You board the flight, you land safely, you pull your netbook from your backpack, fire it up, and then check if there are any available Wireless networks. Indeed there are, unencrypted, passwordless, waiting for you. So you connect to the most convenient hotspot and start surfing. Being addicted as you are, you want to login into your email or social network just to check if something cardinal happened in the world during your four-hour flight. You're about to hit the sign in button. Stop. What you're about to do might not be safe. [more]
Quite true!!!
Who knows if these networks might be setup by feds to watch your every move,etc....... (Ya must be very careful)
You just bought tickets to an exotic vacation spot. You board the flight, you land safely, and you would pull your netbook from your backpack,
but you left it at home because you are on vacation. If you need to check your social network you will do so from the safety of the hotel internet cafe/business center, and you will do so at your leisure.
O wait, your 16 yr old son brought his?
Well he can damn well wait til we get to the hotel to even open the thing up. First, we have to go wait for our luggage, then get to the rental car booth to get our car, or go wait in line to grab a taxi. Now we still have to get across town and check into the hotel before it gets to late and we can make the pool and hopefully an early dinner seating.
Sorry, but if you are the 1% that might actually do anything in that first paragraph, you deserve to get robbed.
Just someone trying to write an article to scare you into reading it.
You're worried about the feds? The realistic problem is "hackers" (for the lack of a better term) that are interested in stealing your information.
VPN is your friend in these scenarios.
VPN's are great for securing connections to other sites. But does nothing to protect the laptop itself, which is now connected to this strange network.
Fact, people use weak to useless passwords.
Fact, people "name" their computer with personal information.
Fact, the administrative share is unknown, unseen by most users, but it's always there. (Can be disabled but only through editing the registry.)
....and you would pull your netbook from your backpack,
but you left it at home because you are on vacation.
I was just about to write the exact same thing.
If I'm in an exotic location, the last thing I'm concerned with is the internet e.g. making sure the 857 "friends" on a social networking site are kept up-to-date on my doings or that I know who won on American Idol last night.
If I'm in an exotic location, the last thing I'm concerned with is the internet e.g. making sure the 857 "friends" on a social networking site are kept up-to-date on my doings or that I know who won on American Idol last night.
While the original article uses the vacation example, everything there pertains to connecting to any connection that you don't know (especially insecure ones), and using any public computer.
But yea I agree, I when I'm on vacation, I don't even want to have internet access.
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