I am sure many of you have, at one point or another, brought a laptop or other device to a public area with wireless internet access (e.g. Starbucks, Barnes and Nobles, airports, hotels, etc.), and proceeded to enjoy free all-can-eat internet to your hearts content. Unfortunately, this freeness comes at a price, your security.
You see, when your connected to a public wifi network, your essentially connected to everyone else who is using that hotspot. And one of those people may be using readily available "packet sniffing" software. In essence, this kind of program picks up information that the other computers in the network are sending and receiving. The only way to keep these kinds of programs from reading your information is to jumble all of it up to the point of unreadability then put it back together again when it gets to your computer (kind of like a puzzle that only your computer can solve). You might be asking yourself how in the world you can do that. The answer is actually relatively simple: encryption.
Not all website have more secure, encrypted versions of their sites, but most sites that deal with sensitive information, such as banks, will automatically have you routed to their secure page. You can usually tell if your in a secure page if a small lock appears next to your address bar in Internet Explorer, which, when clicked on, looks like this:
Or in Safari, it will look like this (notice the little lock on the top right corner):
If a website that deals with your personal information does not route you to a secure page, you can always try changing the "http" at the beginning of the website address to "https." This will take you to the sites secure page, if it actually has one.
So, that's encryption in a nutshell!
Happy surfing everyone!
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