Take Your Broadband On Vacation

Broadband at work or at home makes using the Internet such a pleasure. Most everyone now has a wireless router to distribute their broadband connection to desktop, laptop and notebook computers, plus tablets, e-readers and games. But what happens when you leave the building? Oh, oh. Nothing connects anymore.

What you’d really like to have is a giant hotspot that goes where you go. You may be getting by in town and on the road by finding motels and restaurants that offer free WiFi. But it sure is frustrating when you can’t. What about at your relatives’ house or up at the lake? Internet? No Internet there.

Here’s a new way you can get that traveling WiFi hotspot and not worry about where you are going to find a connection. It’s called the DataJack MiFi. The MiFi is a slick little device about the size of a smartphone or deck of cards. There one button on the top to turn it on and off. Turn it on and you almost instantly have a WiFi signal that can be used by up to 5 devices. It’s called a personal hotspot because it goes with you.

How does the MiFi work? Inside is a rechargeable battery, a WiFi hotspot chip & antenna and a 3G wireless radio. What’s happening is that the MiFi is picking up the Internet wirelessly through cellular radio towers and then re-transmitting it on the WiFi band. This way any device that can connect to WiFi can have cellular wireless Internet.

Oh, but wait. If this is cellular broadband, then don’t you have to sign up for a two-year contract? No, not with this service. It’s pay as you go. There is no contract and no credit check to get turned down. If you decide you don’t want the service anymore, you can quit without having to pay any termination fees.

Think of the possibilities. You are stopped in your car because it is pouring rain. Wouldn’t it be great to see where the storm is headed so you can avoid the worst of it? No problem. Turn on your DataJack MiFi and your notebook computer or tablet and pull up the weather radar for that location. You’ll instantly have much more information that you’d get waiting for a forecast on the radio.

While you’re at it, why not see what restaurants and hotels are available in the area. A quick search by location will give you that and you’ll have their websites to peruse and phone numbers to call if you want to make reservations. All this while sitting in a parking lot in the rain somewhere out there.

Another good use for the same DataJack MiFi is backup broadband service for your home or office computer. Cable and DSL give you excellent connectivity until they don’t. Every broadband service has outages from time to time and it always seems like they go out at the worst possible time. If you have a DataJack MiFi, you can simply turn it on, connect any or all of your computers by WiFi and keep going. When landline service is restored, you can go back to it.

Some people may simply use the MiFi and forget about DSL or Cable Broadband. Why? Because they don’t use a desktop computer that much to justify paying for dedicated broadband every month. What they really want is a service they can use anywhere, including at home, and only pay for one Internet connection. This will work well as long as you are not one of those heavy users that is on all the time downloading HD videos and big software packages. There’s a limit of 5 GB per month, enough for nearly all casual Internet users, with overage charges beyond that.

Does the DataJack MiFi sound like a broadband service that will work for you? Instead of the MiFi, you can also choose a USB DataJack if that’s what your computer needs to connect. Learn more, check for coverage where you want to use it, and order DataJack 3G nationwide wireless broadband service now, so you’ll have it for your next trip.

Beware of Firesheep Lurking in WiFi Hotspots

When you think of RAM, it’s generally along the lines of wishing you could afford more for your laptop or desktop computer. But there’s another type of ram out there that you want nothing to do with. It’s the Firesheep - a serious, serious threat to your privacy.

What’s a Firesheep? It’s a plug-in for the Firefox browser. Fox... Sheep... Get it? Sounds like a joke, but this malicious software is anything but. Download it free, install it on your computer and you can break into other people’s computers running on the same WiFi network.

That wooly looking guy over in the corner of the coffee shop? He could be reading your email right now. He might even be canceling your Facebook account just for fun. Oh, wait, he’s just playing Farmville. It’s the petite blonde sipping her latte and appearing to be tweeting something who’s the real culprit. What she’s tweeting is your passwords to her criminal boyfriend in the car outside.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. You’re the one about to get sheared by this sheep gone bad. Where are you vulnerable? Anywhere you are on an unprotected wireless network. That pretty much includes all coffee shop and restaurant WiFi hotspots. The airport, the car repair shop and the bookstore are suspect too. Unless a hotspot is running encryption on their wireless signal, it’s as open and transparent as a CB radio. Too young to remember “break-one-nine, good buddy”? OK, think about a conversation among friends in a crowded bar. Are you really that sure someone isn’t eavesdropping?

Here’s an even bigger horror story. You never did enjoy privacy on your WiFi connected sessions. Dedicated hackers have had the tools to listen-in on data going over the air from the hotspot access point to user computers for years. You could have been compromised months ago, but for the fortuitous lack of hardcore troublemakers where you happen to frequent. What’s changed is that Firesheep enables even the least talented curiosity seekers and wannabe pranksters to engage in vandalism, identity theft and espionage. Something like 200,000 copies of the Firesheep plugin have been downloaded since it was introduced less than a week ago. Probably more by the time you read this. It’s a baaaaaad situation.

Now that you’ve got a case of the chills that could really use a good hot cup of coffee, let’s talk about how to keep the evil sheep from grazing the green green grass of your computer. The way this thing works is that it lets network snoops sniff packets going between computers and hotspot routers. It also let’s them copy cookies set by the websites you visit. That’s right, they steal your cookies in the coffee shop right off your plate. Since they are only monitoring and copying, you won’t even notice a crumb is missing.

What you need is a way to scramble the messages so that anyone watching will just see gibberish.That kind of scrambling is generally provided as part of a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The IT people at your company may have installed VPN software on your computer before they let you access the company servers. Now you know why. VPN software encrypts any data going to or from your computer so that it makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t have the key. That includes malicious sheep.

But you don’t have a VPN of your own. Well, perhaps you can use your company’s. It depends on how they feel about personal use of their network. Better check and see if they’ll allow it, considering the threat. If not, there are pay VPN services available. Some possibilities are AlwaysVPN, AceVPN and StrongVPN, as suggested by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his post “Five Ways to Shear Firesheep.”

There is some security built into your browser. SSL or Secure Socket Layer is a VPN technology used for online shopping and banking. The problem is that only sites with https addresses rather than http use SSL. Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because a site requires you to log in that your session is secure. Once the log-in process is complete, the cookies being used to store information on your browser may not be encrypted. They’re like fresh grass waiting to be nibbled by the Firesheep.

What’s better than a WiFi hotspot for broadband on the go? Those 3G and 4G wireless modem aircards that use the cellular towers aren’t subject to WiFi snooping. It’s a completely different transmission system. Cellular wireless also has the advantage of enormous coverage areas, so you can use your computer while parked in your car, on a bench in the park or anywhere else you need to be. The only drawback of this service is that it isn’t free or even cheap. It’s about the price of cellular service and typically has the same coverage area.

There’s an interesting aircard device called the MiFi that works to connect cellular broadband with WiFi so that you can get broadband Internet for all your WiFi enabled devices. You can have a couple of computers, a game, an iPad or iPod Touch or even a camera with an Eye-Fi memory card all communicating through the MiFi as your personal hotspot. Just be sure to turn on the WiFi security feature to keep it as your private personal hotspot.

By the way, you are just as vulnerable at home as you are on the road if you aren’t using WiFi security on your home router. It isn’t generally turned on by default because it’s easier to get the network up and running when it is wide open to the world. Take a few minutes, check the manual and make sure you have WEP or WPA security turned on. The peace of mind should more than make up for the inconvenience of dealing with security codes. It addition to thwarting Firesheep, you’ll keep neighborhood hackers and bandwidth moochers off your network. Don’t be surprised if you suddenly seem to have more bandwidth once the security is activated.

Firesheep is a clear and present danger to anyone using wireless Internet access. I’d suggest keeping up with news, blog posts and tweets until it can be proven that this threat has died in the wool. In addition to the Networking blog post mentioned earlier, Peter Shankman’s “Why It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Free Wi-Fi – Part Two” is a good read. It will make your hair, er, wool curl.