Advice On Using Public Wi-Fi?

[Tanis]

Long story short:

I'm living out of a van for the foreseeable future, but I'd still like to access wi-fi with my laptop.

Any tips/tricks/advice to help protect myself from potential baddies?

Maybe even some stuff to make myself a bit more of an anon?

I'll be using, mostly, stuff like McDonalds and gym net.

Edited January 25, 2015 by Tanis

[ZeroPenguins]

I think there are a lot of people misunderstanding how network security works. Public Wi-Fi's are perfectly safe, assuming the person setting it up is competent (i.e. blocking local file and devices sharing AKA isolating each user for example) and also the end user (which is you) has some common sense. Even if the public Wi-Fi point is malicious, all you really need is a firewall and a decent browser to be perfectly safe on a public Wi-Fi. The reason why is because most websites on the internet has TLS/SSL which secures your connection at the application level which in most cases is quite secure. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that Wi-Fi at the Data-Link layer is unsecure, which is why you have Wi-Fi encryption (WEP and WPA) to secure your packets when it gets sent over the air which anyone can capture and read. Doesn’t anyone think why people don’t bother to encrypt wired connections? It’s simply because you don’t need it, as it’s quite hard to even capture packets from there and everything else is secure by the higher network layers. Hence why public Wi-Fi’s are perfectly safe.

 

TL;DR:

It's SAFE! I gave a simplified version how it all works, quite dumbed down I must add. So go read it.