Blogger Tips - What Are Dos and Donts For The Public WiFi?

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Free Wi-Fi service is great. Paid Wi-Fi may be a bit safer (offering you better protection since most have encryption in place), but a wired connection is always best. But then again, wired or wireless--there are no guarantees. There is one other caution: It won't protect the data you send over the internet. That is, if you log into a site, your userID and password may still be seen. So, here are the tips of using public WiFi.

• Keep your antivirus protection up to date and your sensitive data secured--even separately on a drive that is not connected to your laptop when accessing public Wi-Fi.
  
• Don't transmit anything that you wouldn't write on a postcard and send for the world to see, unless it is absolutely necessary.
• Make sure you have NO shared folders on your hard drive. [Optional] Disable or remove the "printer and file sharing" service entirely. This is the ultimate but perhaps extreme answer to point 1., above.
  
• Install a good security service that has both incoming and outgoing firewalls. Something like Norton Internet Security or an equivalent product (the Windows firewall, which may be fine for home use behind a router, has no outgoing firewall). - I would personally recommend you Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0 (Anne Ai Ling)
• To protect your personal data, do not log onto sensitive sites (you have to decide what those are) when using an UNENCRYPTED WiFi network. You will know if you are using an encrypted (WEP or [very much preferably] WPA) network or an unencrypted network, because to use an encrypted network you will have to be given and will have to enter encryption keys (note, this is not the same thing as a password).
  
• The other thing to look for is whether the login screen is http (unencrypted) or https (encrypted) (this is a different encryption from network encryption, e.g. from WEP or WPA). If the login screen is https, you are probably safe even if the network itself is unencrypted. Look for the "padlock" symbol in your web browser.
• Download the free Linux operating system Ubuntu 8.04 and added it to your Vista machine. There is nothing on the Ubuntu partition that would be of interest to a snooper, so even if they could hack into your computer, they'd gain nothing. But the fact is, most hackers would not attempt to hack a Linux machine. There are too few of them. They'd look for Windows machines. Or you can also try PCLinuxOS which is lighter on resources and takes up less space on the hard drive.
• Use your common sense and dont open emails that contain pictures etc unless you have been prior notified by the sender that they will be included in the next email (and you trust the sender)
• Make a backup of your system on disk then make another keep one at home take one with you that way if all goes wrong you can at least take the computer back to how it was. Or, you make a restore point before connecting to unknown hotspots, that way if the hotel or starbucks change system settings or install programs on you to enable their system to work, you can restore back when you leave.