Girl Geekette

In the previous article, we met John Hancock who had just bought a new Dell laptop from Circuit City. He also bought a wireless router and sat outside purchasing a new domain name from Godaddy.com. Enjoying the freedom of the wireless technology, John sat outside in his lounge chair and also purchased a place to host email and a new website he is going to build.

You might have noticed that John did look for the "HTTPS" instead of the "HTTP" when he made a secure transaction. This is a good thing! Kudos to John for remembering to do that. The extra "S" in the URL stands for "Secure" meaning he is making his transaction with a credit card over a secure site. This will prevent anyone else from seeing the credit card numbers on the website (Basically).

John also got a pretty good deal on the Dell laptop from Circuit City. The wireless router was not a bad price either. John can add a few more points to his "shopping karma". Godaddy.com also has some of the lowest prices around for domain registration. Way to go John!

Now, aside for saving money with those purchases, John actually did make some mistakes that could cost him in the long run. The mistakes were not due to the purchases he made. They were due to the technology he is using.

As convenient as wireless networking is, he was not aware of a few things. Namely, how insecure wireless technology can be.

All of the benefits mentioned before - no cords, freedom to move around, etc - all come with a price. That price is insecurity. A cabled network will be the more secure when it comes to cables vs. wireless. You might have all the protection you can think of on your network - a hardware firewall, a software firewall, antivirus protection, the works. John also watched to make sure he was using a secure website as well. While the information John sends over HTTPS is secure through his browser is encrypted, the ofther information he sends over regular HTTP is not. So, in this case if John sent his credit card information to a webpage using HTTPS he is safe. But, anything he sent over regular HTTP is insecure.

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