Then my wife and I bought a new "family" laptop with built-in wireless.
And we started using it occasionally from public access points, like coffee shops, or branches of the New York City Public Library.
I've been realizing, in the back of my mind, that I ought to do something about securing our new wireless laptop. I can't use the corporate VPN, for obvious reasons.
What I really needed, I figured, was some kind of *personal* VPN service that we could subscribe to... a service that, for a few bucks a month, would let us create a secure connection (that couldn't be eavesdropped on) from anywhere we happened to be.
In the course of searching out information on such a service, I stumbled upon something simply wonderful.
It's a $10 electronic book (e-book) called "Take Control of Your Wi-Fi Security." And if you're at all concerned with the issue, it'll be the best $10 you've spent in a long long time.
The authors, two guys with enormous geek credibility (one is the editor of the consensus-best Wi-Fi news and info website, the other has been writing and editing the Macintosh tech newsletter TidBITS since 1990), take the confusing tangle of Wi-Fi security issues and break it down for you in plain language.
The book is a marvel of excellent technical writing for a general audience, and I say this as a technical writer of some 20 years experience. It is completely current and up-to-date as of this writing (published exactly one month ago today: September 15, 2005) and packs a ton of information into a brief (115-page PDF) package; it's full of links to resources on the Web, too, and every link I've tried works: click it in Adobe Reader, and your browser goes right to the site.
(The links alone are worth $10; compared to what you'd have to pay at the local bookstore for an already outdated print copy of Teach Yourself To Be A Wireless Dummy in 15 Days, the e-book is an incredible bargain.)
Look, there are plenty of good, free Wi-Fi information sites on the Web. I'm going to list some of them at the bottom of this post, in case you're too cheap to shell out $10 to a couple of guys who have done all the skull-sweat for you.
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