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 document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

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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