We all love the convenience of WiFi to stay connected anywhere our laptops take us. In fact, you may be reading this article on your wireless-enabled laptop now. But just as the availability of WiFi services proliferate, so does the number of hackers ready to take advantage of unsuspecting road warriors. Now, in addition to long check-in and security lines, the uninformed have one more thing to be anxious about at the airport–identity thieves.

The major concern of users at Wi-Fi hotspots, beyond not being able to connect, is security. These types of wireless networks are inherently “unsecure.” This is because encryption methods such as WEP and WPA, which are usually used to protect private wireless networks, aren’t implemented due to the complexities of supporting users. Furthermore, using WEP or WPA means you’ll have to advertise the “private” encryption key(s). This kills the whole idea of using encryption, because wireless eavesdroppers then have the key(s) to quickly decode the Wi-Fi hotspot traffic.

WiFi hotspots are usually ripe for exploitation by hackers. Once a free WiFi hotspot is launched, there suddenly sprouts up a couple of more “free” WiFi networks that promise to allow you to access the Internet for free. More often than not, these happen to be fake WiFi hotspots that invite you to get fooled into logging onto their networks. After that, stealing your personal and sensitive data is hardly a magic trick.

What’s worse is most people have the habit of instruct their operating systems to “remember” a particular network (or SSID). Now, if one any of their subsequent visits, one of these fake WiFi networks configure the name of their SSID as that of the one already given permission to, on a person’s computer, the computer gets logged onto the network automatically, without the knowledge of the user. Continue reading →

We all love free WiFi, don’t we? Today, with the increasing advent of WiFi enabled gadgets like the brand new iPad, iPhones, Blackberrys and Sony PSPs, CIOL has already predicted a ten-fold growth in such devices, within 2014! The WiFi market is predicted to touch $1 billion in another 2 years. And thus, it’s no surprise that a lot of public WiFi networks have started to sprout up, in your vicinity.

While most of the WiFi enabled hotels charge you for Internet access, there are also a lot of establishments that have started providing WiFi access to their guests for free. Be it malls, coffee shops, apparel stores, or even restaurants, they have all started to jump into the band wagon. Now, why would anyone provide WiFi Internet access for free, you may ask. Let us try to figure out what could the reasons be. Continue reading →

Internet seems to have become one of the most basic necessities of the man. Doesn’t matter which walk of life you belong to, you have an use for the Internet. Whether you need a bandwidth of 64kbps, or whether a fat 4 Mbps is what gets the work done, you do have subscribed to an ISP to take care of your Internet needs. The demand for Internet has grown manifolds, in the last couple of years. According to SiliconIndia, the number of Internet users grew from 42 million in September 2008 to 52 million in September 2009. This surge in number has been primarily due to the increased numbers of the users in the remote urban pockets (small metros and towns) and among lower socio-economic classes. This development has been more striking this year as the combined usage of these geographies and classes have overtaken top cities and higher socio-economic classes in numbers. This finding clearly indicates that the Internet has reached to remote masses in urban India.

The overall Indian Wi-Fi market (including WLAN hardware, systems integration and software services) is predicted to grow from the current $41.57 million to exceed $744 million by 2012 (CAGR of 61.4%). The necessary market drivers are in place to propel the growth, development and deployment of Wi-Fi into a mainstream technology across the country. Continue reading →