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Discussion on: How do you practice safe public wifi access?

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artis3n profile image
Ari Kalfus • Edited

There's this neat thing called HTTPS which uses this thing called encryption to set up a private connection between you and the website that no one can eavesdrop.

Hope that comes off as light hearted and not condescending. VPNs used to be the answer when public WiFi meant using HTTP websites but that's no longer the case. HTTPS sets an encrypted tunnel per user, doesn't matter if others are listening on the wire. The only problem is if they are intercepting your traffic which is easier to do on open WiFi but that's a more complicated hijack (search evil twin attacks). Notably, using a VPN is letting someone intercept your traffic so you should opt on not using a VPN unless you need to avoid geo-blocking.

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skibitsky profile image
Gleb Skibitsky • Edited

Agree. I only use VPN/Tor when I travel to countries that have censorship. In the EU I am fine with just using HTTPS and browser extensions to block ads and tracking stuff.

Also, I use Little Snitch to block requests to Google Analytics API from third-party software installed on my mac