h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I seem to be using wifi more and more with my laptop, both official wifi provided by businesses and informal wifi that you find around the place.

I got lots of good advice in an Ask thread about the risks and vagaries of using wifi, but am wanting something more Mac specific.

Is it possible to set up my laptop so that my internet is separate from the rest of what's on my mac eg my personal files? Do partitions do this? (never really understood what they are). Or is the default security on the Mac good enough.

Not sure what I'm worried about really, but for some reason wifi seems much less secure than dial up or even my own password protected broadband. I guess the chances of running into someone nefarious are more likely using public wifi??

wifi is less secure, mostly because you are broadcasting everything you do online in all directions. Anyone nearby can pick up on it, including passwords etc, or try to use the connection to hack in to your computer.

So, when you are using wifi and especially public wifi, make sure that any time you connect to something that requires a password that it is a secure "https" connection - and most importantly that it *stays* that way. You'll notice that when you log into some sites it will be secure when it asks for your password, but then not have the security afterwards. That's not good, and you'll also notice that banking or other truly secure web sites keep the connection secure the whole time. The problem is that after the initial password information these sites use a "token" or cookie to record that you actually are logged in, on a wireless network someone could steal the token and thus pretend to be you (until you log out), unless it remains an "https" connection. Or they can read the e-mail that you send, etc. It depends on what you are doing on that web site, and in some cases you might not care - for instance here on h2g2 everything we write is public anyway.

The other problem is someone trying to hack into your computer and read your files or something. That's probably not a huge problem on public wifi (people usually are not on the network long enough to be hacked) but you still should turn on the firewall, turn off any services that you don't need right then, and all the other stuff you would normally do to secure any computer on a wired network.

A partition would only help it was encrypted and not in use at the time. You could create a new account for yourself and enable "FileVault" for it, then use that account only when you want to work on extremely private/secure things. Whenever you're on regular wifi, you would use your non-secure "everyday" account. Or you could use Disk Utility to create an encrypted disk image, then save any private stuff on the disk image (it will show up like an extra disk or partition), and simply do not open the disk image when you are on wifi.

So you got schematics for a nuclear powered robot cat, or what?

No-one is supposed to know about robocat!


Someone in my ISP's call centre said things are happening like people in airports set up local networks off their latop and pretend to be the free wifi, and then when people use it they give the fraudster access to their computer.

I'm not sure what I'm concerned about really. ID theft I suppose. But I do keep confidential information on my computer as well

I haven't looked at Filevault properly, will check it out