3 Dangers Of Logging On To Public Wi-Fi

You’ve heard that you shouldn’t open PayPal, your bank account and possibly even your email while using public WiFi. But what are the actual risks?

Well, your home WiFi is (hopefully) encrypted; the WiFi at the coffee shop isn’t. This means you’re at risk of people monitoring your online activity, or worse – unless you know how to protect yourself. Here are a few dangers, and how to avoid them.

Unencrypted Browsing Is Public

WiFi uses radio waves, and radio waves are anything but direct. They broadcast, and this means that anyone within range can see everything you’re doing online, if they have the right software.

This means that, without protection, anyone who wants to can see:

Every site you visit
Every bit of text you send out
Your login information for various sites

The danger here is clear, so naturally you’re going to want protection. At home, you can encrypt your WiFi network – this prevents snooping by making all of your traffic unreadable with a key. Public WiFi, however, usually isn’t encrypted – you can tell this is the case when you don’t need to type a password in order to connect.

Does this mean you’re defenceless? No.

Your first line of defence is OpenSSL, a kind of encryption offered by many websites: Google, Facebook and most banks, to name a few. This technology encrypts the traffic between you and another site, meaning no one will be able to snoop on that activity. You’ll know OpenSSL is on when you see “HTTPS” in your browser’s address bar, like this:

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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