Private Information in Public Places

One of the truly beautiful things about computing today is wireless networking. You can install a wireless network rather inexpensively and easily in your own home, and work on your laptop from any room in the house. A word of caution here . . . your spouse may not be too happy about you bringing your laptop to bed (trust me)!

You can also access WIFI (Wireless Fidelity, or Wireless Local Area Networks) in public places, sipping a cappacino while catching up on email. Ahh, a real thing of beauty.

But are public networks everything they're cracked up to be, or are they just networks of people waiting to crack into your computer?

A little of both. When you connect to a network wirelessly, you are putting your computer (and its contents) into a group of other computers on a network. Assuming the person next to you knows what they're doing, they could log onto your computer and look through all your files - and you wouldn't even know it!

Most people won't do this, but there are some criminal opportunists who frequent public WIFI access locations just for this purpose. So if you still need that double vanilla nonfat latte while surfing the Internet, proceed with caution.

Most general surfing is OK. If you want to send an email though, you should probably use your cell phone instead. Believe it or not, that's safer.

And while you're at it, disable file and printer sharing and set up user accounts and password logons. This will give you a little added protection.

. . . Stephanie

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