Open to the world

Wi-Fi may be handy when away from home or office. But beware, you may have unwanted company while surfing

No one in the evening crowd at a Starbucks knew Humphrey Cheung. But he knew things about them. Several tables away was a guy sitting alone with his own laptop. 8220;He8217;s starting a business,8221; Cheung said. And the young couple in the far corner? 8220;They8217;re getting married,8221; he confided.

Cheung isn8217;t psychic. He had hacked into the coffee shop8217;s wireless Internet connection on his Toshiba laptop. It took about five minutes to do so, using free software available online.

Public Wi-Fi, or 8220;wireless fidelity,8221; is very handy for perusing the Net away from the office or home. Just remember that you may have company while surfing. 8220;When people are on a public wireless connection, they have the same expectations about privacy as when they are on the Internet at home,8221; said Cheung, 32, a computer security expert and an editor for TG Daily, a technology news website. 8220;But it doesn8217;t work that way. Someone could be listening in.8221;

Cheung was using a 8220;sniffer8221; program that intercepted online signals as they flew back and forth from the laptops to a wireless modem hidden somewhere amid the coffee paraphernalia. Mostly, the monitoring was limited to tracking the websites being visited. Numbers correlating to web addresses flew across Cheung8217;s computer screen, allowing him to see that the couple was viewing pages at a wedding-planning site. The man a few tables away started with sites selling high-speed broadband service, then went to a page about managing websites. Like a mystery yarn, the clues kept coming in.

8220;You start to get a story about someone,8221; Cheung said.

The company that provides Wi-Fi signals at Starbucks is T-Mobile USA Inc. It manages about 7,600 HotSpots nationwide, including in coffee shops, hotels and airports. T-Mobile offers a free software program, Connection Manager, to improve browsing security, said Mike Selman, the service8217;s marketing director. 8220;You can use this to make sure you are connected properly to our network,8221; Selman said, 8220;and that communications are encrypted from the laptop.8221; But the security program also seems to be more or less a secret. Not only does the name of the program not mention security, but the link to download it also is grouped with other items in a dropdown menu. If you have a Macintosh computer, you8217;re out of luck: The software comes only in a Windows version.

On home Wi-Fi setups, password protection can be implemented on the modem, which offers a lot of security8212;although some hackers say they can break through the most basic protection regimen, known as WEP. Public Wi-Fi setups, whether paid or free, don8217;t have the luxury of using passwords. That would defeat the purpose of allowing a great many people to use them.

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Free Wi-Fi hot spots are being added to more outdoor areas everywhere. So, enjoy the freedom of Wi-Fi. But maybe you shouldn8217;t surf to sites you wouldn8217;t want people to know you8217;re visiting. 8220;If you watch where people go, one site after another,8221; Cheung said, 8220;it8217;s almost like you can read their minds.8221;
-David Colker Los Angeles Times