Im a newbee to WiFi, having just got a laptop which is wifi enabled. Ive
read up a bit on it and have even connected to a local unsecured PC to PC
network very local which lets me access to net !
However I do understand that I will have to enrole in an ISP giving secure
access in the area I move to but my question is this :
I readup an article by a railways site detailing how to connect on a train
and it told users to make sure that encryption was selected to OFF. Now
this has me puzzled because I will want to use internet banking which must
be secure of course, or am I on the wrong track ?
humperdink001
Junior Member Posts: 11 Registered: 10/2/05 Status: Offline
posted on 23/5/05 at 11:02
Most public hotpsots do not use encryption because in order to do so, you
would need to know the proper encryption key and would have to manually
enter this into your wireless card settings. They do not want users to have
to go through all that trouble and plus if the encryption key was made
publicly available that would defeat the whole purpose of encryption to
begin with. If a potential hacker knows the encryption key, then he can
grab your wireless netwrk packets and decrypt them. Wireless encryption
only encypts the netwrk packets between your laptop and the wireless access
point. When doing any online transactions at a bank for instance, the
bank's website use ssl (https://) to securely encrypt your information
between your laptop and their webserver, therefore you do not need the
wireless encryption. Anytime you enter credit card info, etc on a website,
be sure the site is using ssl, this will be indicated by the website url
starting with https:// and your browser will usually display an icon of a
padlock to indicate you are using ssl encryption.
