EggXpert

Safe surfing on the Internet at a public hot spot - safety course question:

At home I use my desktop computer for work and school. But now I want to start using my laptop for the same thing at a public hot spot. That means I'll be going on the Internet via wi-fi on a daily basis. I understand that when it comes to safe surfing a VPN is something a security concious person should set up on their laptop, the first choice experienced wi-fi surfers opt to use to combat packet sniffers. Is that true? If so, can you recommend the name of a good VPN? And will the VPN slow down my surf sessions at all as opposed to a hard wired connection?

No, you can't really get any good security when you're out in public... Period..

All someone has to do is whip out their cell phone and record a short video of you typing in your username and password and then there goes you security right out the window.. Same thing for logging into just about any website, once you get a video of somebody pressing the keys, you just slow the video down to 1 FPS and you can see exactly what username and password they're entering and exactly what websites they're going to.

It doesn't matter if you have AES 256 Bit encryption on your data if somebody can capture the password you use to decrypt the data.
 

No you don't want a VPN.

What you want is a good firewall. It's pretty much all you can do.

Comodo Personal Firewall is good and free. 

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

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Yes Public hot spots you can't expect too much from it. The encryption  WEP has its flaws.

a firewall will be okay. I use Kaspersky Interenet  Security. 

In reality if you are using a public Wi-Fi, then you run risks period. In fact there is a disto of Linux out there right now based on Slackware, but this disto is meant for one thing only, remote exploits. Nuff said. As for a VPN they are not as secure as people may think.

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don't know too much about VPN, but a good firewall will work just fine. I'm using Kaspersky too and it works great so far. Try it if u like

Kaspersky Anti-Virus Update October 31, 2009 Free Download