Matthowie points out that HotSpotVPN is a great, cheap, cross-platform service that secures all your promiscuous WiFi traffic by tunneling it to the company's servers (great idea, but only if you trust HotSpotVPN…). I do something like this with my own traffic, tunneling my mail and Web sessions over ssh to a secure box in a cage. You know what? This might just be the bizmodel for WiFi.
To check the security, I disconnected from HotSpotVPN's servers and ran Ethereal (a packet sniffer) on my desktop PC that's also on the network. I checked my email and checked the output on ethereal and my username, pop servers, and passwords were all in the clear. I connected to the VPN and ran the same test and only see garbled text that isn't even showing up as POP commands as the traffic is all being sent through the VPN securely. The only downside is that you have to trust that the company running HotSpotVPN is going to be secure with their data, as they could be sniffing/logging/analyzing your traffic on their end, but frankly I think the chances of that happening are slim, since they've been around for a couple years and doing anything like this would end the business for them.
Long story short, this is the best $8.88/month I've spent and I'm going to set up an account for all my wireless devices.
