On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 22:38 +0300, Grant wrote: > Hello! I am travelling and am currently on the Greek island of Corfu. > It is great! I have my laptop but I'm finding it totally impossible > to find a place that will let me plug into their network for Internet > access. I can't use public systems because of keyboard loggers and > bank passwords etc. My business is seriously dying at this point and > after a lot of thinking, I think my best option is to get my modem > working and hire one of the global dial-up providers. I should be > able to find a phone line wherever I am. Does anyone have a better > idea? If not, does anyone recommend a particular one of these > companies?
As others have mentioned, make sure that your web browser's connection to the remote server is SSL-encrypted. This is not perfect encryption, it can be broken, but it requires a huge amount of computing horsepower to do it. In addition, double-click the small "lock" icon in the corner of the screen and make sure that the certificate is validated by an issuing authority that you trust (such as Thawte, Verisign, etc.) You are right to be concerned about using insecure computers (such as those in Internet cafes, etc), because all the SSL encryption in the world won't stop a keystroke logger that's resident on the machine, or worse, a hardware keystroke logger sitting in-line with the keyboard connection. How you access - whether it be via dial-up modem, DSL/cable, wireless lan, GSM mobile phone data, or whatever, doesn't matter. All of those methods are inherently insecure because they all connect to the same untrusted Internet. So long as your communication is encrypted, it doesn't matter which connection means you select, you know that however insecure the pipe, the data traveling between your browser and the remote server is secure. Think of it like sending a letter. From when you drop your letter at the post office to the time it lands in the recipient's mail box, how many hundreds of people will handle it? Any one of them could open it, or a neighbor could snag it, or worse. But as long as you encode the letter before sticking it in the envelope, it doesn't matter how insecure the delivery channel is. HTH, Dave -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
