Free Computer Consultant Tip-Of-The-Week for March 13,
2009
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"Safe WiFi and Anonymous Surfing"
This week I'm going to talk about a topic that will try to
kill two
birds with one stone.
Last week I mentioned illegal music downloading as one of
the most
hazardous behaviors to the health of your PC and recommended a
legal
alternative with a lot of other features and advantages.
You can check out a Free 14 day trial to Rhapsody here:
http://www.RhapsodyFreeTrial.com
Thank you to everyone who wrote to me with their favorite
way of
listening to music, or favorite website.
(Websites: Jango, LastFM, Pandora & Slacker are most
popular)
Other than Rhapsody, iTunes is obviously a favorite
also.
Free song of the week from iTunes here:
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=1nf9NkSTTNY&offerid=146261.10001713&type=4&subid=0
For those of you concerned about the legality of
downloading
songs and movies from some of these "free" sites, let's segue
to:
-------------
Today's topic
-------------
Many of you have probably tried the free program Tor for
either
anonymous surfing or an attempt at WiFi safe surfing. I
have
tried to use Tor a number of times and always giving up in
frustration over the serious performance degradation in the
internet connection.
Some also argue that Tor leaves at least one site (the first
hop)
with your true identity and information.
And most would agree that implementing Tor can be daunting
for
most users.
What if you have nothing to hide? (Which is actually another
topic)
Using free WiFi is another potentialy hazardous behavior to
your
computer. There are a wide variety of methods of attack by
rogue
individuals to prey on open WiFi users.
Unfortunately, having a good internet security suite
doesn't
protect you. The data moving to and from your computer via
open
WiFi is available for anyone to see and even potentially
manipulate
with a fairly easy to use, free and readily available set of
tools.
Creating a protected "tunnel" for your surfing and other
internet
activity can protect not only your surfing habits and
identity
but also your machine from attack.
----------------
A great solution
----------------
I love open source products and free products as well as
the
next person - some would argue more.
But sometimes you get what you pay for.
We need a solution for two potential problems:
1) You might be concerned about entities tracking your
surfing
2) You may travel or otherwise rely on free WiFi and want to be
safe
2a) This solution also works for the iPhone
Here is a solution I have been testing recently and been
very
impressed with.
GoTrusted has a secure tunnel solution that will make all of
your
surfing anonymous, secure your email, instant messaging etc, is
easy
to use and DOES NOT IMPEDE PERFORMANCE!
With one click you can turn on the tunnel and all of your
internet
traffic is secure.
With my testing, using SpeedEasy.net/speedtest/, actually
showed a
slight performance INCREASE (haven't figured out why yet).
The downside is that GoTrusted is not free; but they do have
a free
trial. And GoTrusted's service is reasonably priced.
----------
Free Trial
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If you do use open WiFi, have any concern for your privacy,
or maybe
sometimes frequent a music or video download site, give
GoTrusted's
free trial a spin.
http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com/go/gotrusted/
Surf Safe!
Until next time...
-----------
You can keep up with articles I write and videos I create,
for the most part, at:
http://www.AssociatedContent.com/freecomputerconsultant
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The Free Computer Consultant
http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com
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