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Safe Options for Surfing While on the Road?
Sooner Boomer asks: "My oldest brother is an over-the-road truck driver. He subscribes to several wireless services at truck stops (Flying J, Pilot, etc.). I've tried to help him and educate him as much as possible, but he still has two problems; connectivity (poor signal strength) and security. His truck has a fiberglass shell, so that is not the problem. He has to run IE because this is the only browser supported for the log-in process. We've talked about wireless routers with reflectors on the antennas to boost signal strength, and to help with security. I'm still looking for better security though. Are there "live" linux browsers that can be run once a connection is made in windows? It's really gotten annoying because he has to reformat/reinstall about every two-three months. Ideas? Good trucker jokes?"
Well, this should be little different from securing any other Windows machine connected directly to a public network..
Indeed a router might help here, provided it also has some decent firewall functionality. I would myself go for a WRT54GL with OpenWRT, setup as a wireless client and with its wireless connection firewalled and doing address translation.
It would be very nice if you could get around the authentication problem by directly posting the authentication info with some script, woudl also remove the need for IE, but will probably take a bit of scripting in perl or the like, might even be able to solve this one with just some bash script and tools like wget. You'll have to figure out what the authentication page expects from the client. Makes you wonder of course why they aren't supporting WPA and 'enterprise authentication' so that clients get authenticated at the wireless network level and get to use proper encryption. Sould not be difficult to support considerig that many ISPs use some radius server for authentication already anyway and that is all they really need.
When using a router/firewall, the connection will stay up regardless of you rebooting the laptop, so you should be able to switch OS or whatever else you want to do.
But in the end, reinstalling Windows every few months should not be needed provided the WIndows machine has some important tools installed, such as a decent personal firewall, anti-virus tools and some adware/spyware blocker/remover.
Also, you can authenticate using IE, and then use Firefox for browsing I'd say, so unless there are other compelling reasons, I see no reason why running another browser would mean running another OS.
Of course, you could also use something liek vmware or such and run a live linux distro on top of Windows. Refer to the many 'which live CD to use' discussions of the last years for info on that, or just try a few.