How do I encrypt my browsing on public access wifi?
I need to encrypt even before it gets to the public wifi network owner, so that it works on any public network – security enabled or not.
Has anyone built a an encryted proxy plugin or anything like that? Or is there an easier way to do this?
question open 3 days and no answers yet? i’ll have a try…
there are probably several ways to achieve this. a few that come to mind:
any website that you navigate to with https should provide sufficient encryption for that one browser window (e.g. https://mail.google.com/ (gmail), https://mail.yahoo.com/ (yahoo mail), etc.). this of course will not encrypt any other browser windows (e.g. http://www.google.com/) or other services (e.g. yahoo instant messenger) for the same provider.
if you can initiate a vpn session to a remote computer, and ensure that all of your traffic goes over the vpn tunnel (as opposed to going out to the public internet from your machine), that would certainly work. many employers provide vpn access to their employees, but connecting to such a vpn would be similar to being connected to their office network. they can and probably will log each site you visit.
if you have a computer at home in addition to the one you are using with public wifi, you could set up your own vpn and connect to it remotely. while i have never done this myself, i believe the product openvpn could be used to do this for free. once connected to such a vpn, your traffic would be encrypted through the public wifi hotspot, but it would not be encrypted (unless you are using an encrypted protocol, like https) between your home machine and the site you are connecting to.
vnc is another tool you can use to remote control your home machine. there are several vnc products available for free, but none of the ones i know of encrypt all of your traffic. tightvnc and ultravnc both encrypt your password, but all traffic after that is unencrypted. tightvnc’s site recommends setting up an ssh tunnel to encrypt all traffic. this isn’t too hard for someone with experience in networking and setting up servers, but most end users would find setting this up to be complicated and prohibitively difficult. there’s probably a remote control application similar to vnc that would be useful, but i’m not sure if any of them encrypt all of your traffic. gotomypc comes to mind, as does microsoft remote desktop. look into those if you wish.
there are some public proxy sites that support https. i would be reluctant to use such a site for anything that you want to keep private, as i suspect that the operators of any such site would be able to snoop on any data you send (e.g. email login and password) or receive (e.g. email contents).
good luck 
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