Working on your laptop using free Wi-Fi Hotspots from the local coffee shop?

You just love your laptop! You take it with you everywhere you go. Now that you can have a Wi-Fi connection almost anywhere, there is no need to stay secluded in your house working those long hours alone… right?

You tough that having a firewall and an anti-virus software installed on your laptop meant that you where safe surfing at those WiFi access points (or hotspots). Boy are you wrong!

It is in fact not so hard for someone with the right knowledge and some free open source software to see what you are doing (and everybody else using the same connection) on the web while surfing using your wireless connection.

They can capture your login information from Facebook, Gmail or your credit card number when you do an online transaction. Your laptop becomes a plain pen for hackers.

A hacker could be sitting right next to you at your local coffee shop. He could be “sniffing” the Wi Fi network and stealing people information.

The easiest way to protect yourself is by using a secure VPN. It will encrypt your connection thus making it unreadable to other. Maybe your employer has a VPN setup on there server, if so, use it. You can also find some good online service that will provide 128 or 256-bit encryption. Some of them are complicated and not so easy to setup if you’re not a computer geek!

The easiest on you could install and use is a software called Anonymizer Universal. It is a simple software that you install on your Windows, Mac OS or iPop/iPhone/iPad. It will encrypt all of your internet traffic. From your email software, your weather or stocks reader on your desktop to your browser. The only thing you have to setup is the install of the software and your user name and password. That’s it! It will even rotate your IP address every 24 hours.

There are some other option like Identity Cloaker. This one is more versatile but at the same time, a little more complicated to use (actually, not much). Identity Cloaker is at the time of writing, only for Windows machine!

It will also only protect your browser traffic so if you are using an email software like Outlook, it will not encrypt your email data. At this time, there are 13 servers with 142 IPs in 8 countries in the Identity Cloaker network! You can connect to any one of them and even have Identity Cloaker rotate between all the server at any given time interval!

Using those 2 service will assure you a safe and secure surfing experience.

I have chosen to write about Anonymizer and Identity Cloaker because they are the software I personally use on my laptop. There support service are excellent and there software top quality.

If you do any work on the road, you really need to protect yourself and those 2 software are your safest choice.