Finding that Free, Secure Wireless Hotspot

Today was the first trial run working out of a coffee shop while sucking on the free wireless. When I'm wandering around in strange cities I figure I'll end up doing this a lot so I wanted to try it out. It's important to know this is going to work, since my job is tied closely to the web*.

Today, my office was in Waves, by Waterfront, downtown. As I wandered over there, I stopped a few times to scan the available WiFi networks using my new toy: a Canary Wireless Hotspotter. This little gadget can give you quite a bit of information about the available networks without forcing you to wander around with your laptop open. (Check out this sketch of some one doing just that.)

Everywhere I checked there were from five to nineteen networks available, though I couldn't gain access to a lot of them because they're secure. I'm not too sure how I feel about surfing regularly on insecure networks, anyway. Would hate to have my information available to others when I'm doing online banking or trading stocks... if I were to ever trade stocks, lol. Still, having somebody else go through your emails isn't a pleasant thought, and malicious users could potential put harmful files on my laptop and that's definitely not cool.

After reading a couple articles on the topic it looks like you're fairly safe from having your data intercepted if you're browsing over a secure connection (SSL). That's when the little lock logo appears in the bottom right corner. Pretty much all banks and online stores use it, and email providers often use this for logging in. That means your bank/credit card/password data is protected not necessarily the contents of your emails. You login and once your identity is confirmed you go back to an unsecured connection. I checked this with my GMail account and that's exactly what happened. However, if I changed the protocol from "http" to "https" in the location bar, it didn't kick me back to an unsecured connection—I now had access to email without prying eyes.

If I'm lucky, I'll be able to have the best of both worlds: free and secure wireless. On the last day of my short trip to Paris last December I found a nice little café very close to my room. I sat down and flipped open the 'book and realized that I needed a passkey to connect. My French is terrible, so it took a little effort to decode "sept, cinq, pay, uh, es..." into English but my data was safe and I didn't have to pay for anything I didn't eat or drink. (-:

I hope that doesn't turn out to be the exception.

* Unfortunately, having a job that requires an internet connection—or power, for that matter—limits my destinations a bit but there's plenty of broadband world to see.