The service then proxies all your traffic to and from its destination. Your device connects with the VPN service's servers and establishes an encrypted tunnel for all your Internet traffic from the device to their servers.

But there are public services as well, such as F-Secure's Freedome and Privax's HideMyAss. Most people, if they use a VPN at all, use a corporate one. But for broader protection, many people use a virtual private network (VPN). Large sites like Twitter and Google have adopted SSL broadly in order to protect users on such networks. But one of the main solutions to this problem has a hole in it that isn't widely appreciated. Those free connections in cafes and hotels don't encrypt network traffic, so others on the network can read your traffic and possibly hijack your sessions. Larry began his career as a Software Engineer at the now-defunct Desktop Software Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey, on the team that wrote the NPL 4GL query language.īy now, any sentient IT person knows the perils of open Wi-Fi. Larry Seltzer is the former editorial director of BYTE, Dark Reading, and Network Computing at UBM Tech and has spent over a decade consulting and writing on technology subjects, primarily in the area of security.

Launch internet explorer in safe mode