Apologies in advance for being off-topic, but am I the only one who hates people hunched over their laptops while hogging starbucks' chairs for hours . I work in a downtown location and its impossible to have your coffee at starbucks as there is no place to sit. I really wish Starbucks could charge for seating ;-)
Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#62Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use the router to solve the dynamic IP issue. It updates to http://www.dyndns.com when my IP address changes.
That is a great option for people who have a dd-wrt/tomato/etc. compatible wireless device. The goal of the post was for folks who don't already have a solution setup and to get people familiar with EC2 now that it has a Free Tier and see some of the "not so obvious" things we can do with.
You don't need to have dd-wrt. I've got a used corporate firewall (which also works as a router) it has built in VPN and built in support for updating to DynDNS... I bought it for 80 dollars, not too far off from vanilla routers - I did have to pair it with an access point, so costs aren't completely comparable.
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#64I just found out a few weeks ago that my ISP, Sonic.net, offers an IPsec VPN endpoint to all of its customers, with no additional fees. I highly recommend them if you're in the SF Bay Area.
Note that while their help page suggests that you use the Cisco client software to connect to their VPN endpoint, the service works just fine with Mac OS X's built-in Cisco IPsec client, as well as with the IPsec client in iOS. Dunno about other platforms, but Sonic.net provides the Cisco client for Windows and GNU/Linux, at least.
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#65I keep a server up-n-running 24/7 anyway, doing lots of things (file server, UPnP, the whole nine yards), it's on cable Internet with a dynamic DNS. So I installed OpenVPN on it and all my laptops automatically connect to it when they boot up. The server also runs a proxy. So I've a secure proxy available any time, from anywhere.
How's your latency? An advantage of connecting to an EC2 instance seems to be that you're getting your traffic onto the backbone without eating a "last mile" roundtrip to your house.
EC2 scenario:
coffee shop -> backbone -> EC2 -> backbone -> remote site (probably hosted somewhere close to your EC2 instance, especially if a CDN is in use)
Home scenario:
coffee shop -> backbone -> cable provider -> home -> cable provider -> backbone -> remote server
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#66How to start a SOCKS proxy on localhost:12345 proxying through your account foo on bar.example.com: ssh -D 12345 -N -f foo@bar.example.com
Tip: you can group the flags together like so:
ssh -fND 12345 foo@bar.example.com
ssh -ND 12345 foo@bar.example.comRe: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#67Ah, so easy! Only 28 steps filled with remote Linux shell commands, certificate creation, and downloaded software! I'm sure that's exactly what his wife wanted to hear when she asked how to avoid being Firesheeped. Whatever happened to good old ssh -ND ? Wouldn't that solve 90% of most casual hotspot users' problems ? And I'd be wary suggesting even that one-liner to someone who isn't a techie, which I'm assuming his…
> Whatever happened to good old ssh -ND ?
YouTube doesn't work.
Also, it's not a one-liner on a Windows client. OpenVPN is really, really easy to use once someone set it up for you. Two clicks and you're connected.
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#6828 steps??
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#69How to start a SOCKS proxy on localhost:12345 proxying through your account foo on bar.example.com: ssh -D 12345 -N -f foo@bar.example.com
Tip: you can group the flags together like so: ssh -fND 12345 foo@bar.example.com Also, the -f flag will cause it to fail if you don't have passwordless auth set up. If you don't have it set to use private/public key pairs, just tunnel like so: ssh -ND 12345 foo@bar.example.com
Nah, -f will prompt for password before backgrounding the process.
Re: Protect yourself from FireSheep with Amazon EC2 + OpenVPN for $0.50 a month
#70Ah, so easy! Only 28 steps filled with remote Linux shell commands, certificate creation, and downloaded software! I'm sure that's exactly what his wife wanted to hear when she asked how to avoid being Firesheeped. Whatever happened to good old ssh -ND ? Wouldn't that solve 90% of most casual hotspot users' problems ? And I'd be wary suggesting even that one-liner to someone who isn't a techie, which I'm assuming his…
> Whatever happened to good old ssh -ND ? YouTube doesn't work. Also, it's not a one-liner on a Windows client. OpenVPN is really, really easy to use once someone set it up for you. Two clicks and you're connected.
Works for me.
ssh as a SOCKS proxy, Firefox uses it, Flash uses it.
about:config set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.