I showed a friend of mine the answers to the questions I asked here previously. He was marvelled at the amount of info we could get free. He, in turn, told me to ask if there was any possibility of automating the public wifi security settings.
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Yes, you don’t want to have to manually adjust all of these settings every single time you go back and forth between the coffee shop and your secure home network.
There are a few ways to automate the process so you automatically get extra protection when connected to a public Wi-Fi network.
On Windows
When you first connect to any given network on Windows, you’ll be asked whether you’re connecting to a network at your home, work, or if it’s public. Each of these choices will flip the switch on a preset list of settings. The public setting, naturally, will give you the most security. You can customize what each of the presets entails by
From there, you can turn network discovery, file sharing, public folder sharing, media streaming, and other options on or off for the different profiles. That’s a good start, but if you want a bit more control.
On OS X
OS X doesn’t have these options built-in like Windows, but an app like ControlPlane can do a fair amount of customization. With it, you can turn on your firewall, turn off sharing, connect to a VPN, and a whole lot more, all depending on the network you’ve connected to. Also, Firefox extension automatically chooses the secure HTTPS option for a bunch of popular web sites, including the New York Times, Twitter, Facebook, Google Search, and others, ensuring secure HTTPS connections to any supported web site, every time you visit. You can even add your own to their XML config file.
Consider a “Safety First” Approach
If you’re a real road warrior, you may find yourself adding so many profiles that automating your safe settings at every step along the way may seem like a lot of work. A better approach may be to make your more secure settings the default for your system and create just one profile for your home network. Thus, by default, file sharing would be turned off, your firewall would be at its most secure state, and so on—then, when you return home to your protected network, you can have Airport Location or NetSetMan turn your less secure settings on.
This isn’t all-encompassing by any means but should give you a good quick checklist of things you should do every time you connect to a public network.
Of course, some of us already have your own public browsing routines, so be sure to share your safe networking tips in the comments.
This step works for me, you can share what works for you as well