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PrivateVPN.com – Part I
by Andrew McCaskey
Here’s what’s happening as I get online with PublicVPN , a service designed for individuals, small business, and consultants.
It’s probably old hat to a lot of SDR listeners. On the other hand, some of you who are primarily business or government types who rely upon your company IT, as I do you might find this interesting when you have to catch some WiFi on your own hook.
There are really two items of concern: connecting to open WiFi access points when you are traveling and should know better, or connecting to access points that are “secure” in higher class hotels or at client sites that lead you to a false sense of security.
The problem is acute (and obvious) when you are in a hotel or coffee shop that provides “Free WiFi” where there are lots of opportunities for packet sniffing at your expense. Or, when you have been trying to grab a connection to check email in a forest of access points.
Up until yesterday, I thought that WEP was at least some level of privacy, and that the main effect was to cause bad guys to move along to open access points. The Informit.com article on the ChopChop program that I cited yesterday finally bought it into focus – WEP is just about worse than no encryption at all. My conclusion is that business travelers in hotels with “secure” WiFi are particularly attractive targets.
PublicVPN.com is $6 a month, pay as you go,and will cover this next trip without a problem. I see that the install is something that you do in the morning when you are fresh and on the ball, not at the end of a day. One thing that I did learn, is don’t try the setup in one window and actually doing the download in another window. Either print it out or find another box that you can use in parallel to read the instructions and perform the operation on the laptop. I’ll tackle part 2 tomorrow.
PublicVPN is upfront that my connection speeds will be degraded. It’s going to be interesting to see how much. If you are using WiFi, you’ll find that it is a hit that you are willing to take. Compared to the alternative.
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Recent Items Mentioned:
Inbox Zero: One of the guideposts along the way will be some articles from the excellent site for personal productivity at 43 Folders , specifically an article entitled “My email diet” in the Inbox Zero – Day 1series.
From the 43Folders Inbox Zero process, I’m learning that these tools are no substitute for ruthless triage of escalating questions:
1. What does this message mean to me and why do I care ?
2. What action, if any, does this message require of me ?
3. What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains ?
These questions were most valuable getting from 400 to 100 items. After that, the default
Outlook folder “Unread Items” kept the new stuff in one place – just reading headers and sender lines for easy zapping
The free 40 page downloadable e-Book from Rajesh Setty, a fellow Gnomedexer.. “Personal Branding for Technology Professionals”, It’s some heavy reality for anyone in the technology arena – especially the IT field or pure technologists.
Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable.
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