Look (out), no wires

Can you hear the alarm bells? It's like the top of the hour in a clock factory.

Here's the deal. You run a router, plugged into a modem, that's plugged into the wall. The modem side of the router may have a firewall and that's something to play with, some people preferring it to the equivalent package for non-mobile machines. Otherwise, your PC pushes and pulls data packets to and from the wireless box.

... It's those few feet of invisible waves, and their potential interception, that concerns us.

What we need to do is to harden the web connection so that sensitive data can't be stolen and the neighbors aren't riding pillion on the bandwidth.

Alt: physical cable connection

The inconvenient alternative, perhaps, wires are the safest as well as the fastest choice. There is no way to improve upon the security of a cabled connection.

The wireless management utility

Plug your PC into the router with an ethernet cable and browse to its IP address to open its manager. The address...