The prevalence of free/cheap and open Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, airports, offices and hotels is a great boon to the traveling Mac or iPad user; it makes connectivity and remote work much easier than it used to be.
Unfortunately, since most of those networks don't employ WEP or WPA passwords to secure the connection between device and hotspot, every byte and packet that's transmitted back and forth is visible to all the computers on the wireless LAN, all the time. While certain sites and services use full-time browser encryption (the ones that have URLs beginning with https:// and that show a lock in the browser status bar), many only encrypt the login session to hide your username an
