How to encrypt your wifi access for free January 15th, 2008
Every road warrior should be paranoid about the security of the connections. However, the advantage of being on the go is also its disadvantage, e.g., being able to use public wifi hotspots. For corporate folks, it is a must to have a VPN connection before transacting business with your corporate servers. To most ordinary mortals, however, this is a luxury.
There are VPN services such as publicVPN, hotspotVPN and WiToPia's VPN services, but they are all subscription-based, either on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual contract. There is one additional player in the market that uses an ad-driven business model to subsidize the cost of providing VPN connections and it is called Hotspot Shield.
AnchorFree "operates the largest presence-based, out-of-home digital advertising and marketing platform at Wi-Fi broadband venues." As such, advertisers will occupy a small portion of your browser window whilst connected via VPN. You can close the advertisement if you find it annoying but it will show itself when you open another website.
Personally, it is a small price to pay. You just download a small app, run it and then surf to all your heart's content. As an added bonus to those who are outside of the US, you can now browse through websites that are limiting access via IP, e.g., Pandora.com, since the VPN service is in the US, you get a US IP address. Cool, huh?