Yes, I know I fit the cliche here, but I like to work outside my office in a coffee shop or another public location. It’s a good feeling to have some people around instead of seeing the same faces all day long – or even no faces when you’re a lonesome freelancer like me ;) However, there are two drawbacks I was never happy with: First almost all public WLAN hotspots are unencrypted, which is quite a security problem, and second some networks don’t allow the use of certain services (e.g. the network at my university doesn’t allow me to send emails via secure SMTP). Luckily the solution to this problem is quite simple: We need a local SOCKS5 proxy that routes all internet traffic through a secure SSH tunnel.
All you need is a working Mac OS X, my WiFiTunnel script (Installer or ZIP archive) and a SSH Server outside of your local network. No idea where to get such a server? Well, there are some public SSH servers out there, but almost all virtual server packages offer SSH, so just try to connect to a server that hosts one of your websites. All necessary details are explained during the script installation, but you should read on if you want to get the whole story.
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