The High Order Bit

Ha – just noticed, I can track where I’ve been by looking at my Mac’s memory of wireless networks to which I’ve connected. I’m not sure what that says about me…It’s sad that memories are sparked by “Washington Dulles WiFi” “Wireless Vienna Airport” “Inn at Sonoma” “Inn at Sonoma 2″ “Catfish’s Network” “ShadyShores1″ “VitalogyWiFi” “Enchanted Garden” and “2GoldFish” among hundreds of others.

Incidentally, here’s a tip for all you wireless roamers: when you’re on the road, especially in a public wireless network, it’s best to be really careful about surfing so as to keep your belongings secured at all points (”Did you pack your own bag?”, “Was your bag with you at all times?”, “Have you let every person in the airport know your email password by sending it unencrypted over our unsecured wireless network?”) . I can never remember to be that careful, so here’s what I do – be ready to be geeked.

I setup a secure ssh tunnel and proxy my web traffic through that. I happen to have a few servers that I can run this through, but you can always use your broadband connected home mac (or PC with ssh-server installed). At the command line, I type:

ssh -D 9999 evan@freshkills.xyz.com -p 22

Then in Firefox, I go to my network preferences (Firefox, Preferences, Advanced, Network, Settings) and select “Socks Host” and type 127.0.0.1  with 9999 as the port. This routes all network traffic in Firefox through freshkills.xyz.com over ssh (secure shell).  Fun stuff, I know.

Oh – by the way – check out http://www.no-ip.com/ if you want to setup a free url that points to your home machine at all times. And remember to update your router to handle ssh traffic!