Preferably something free but a low cost option is fine. For browsing unsecured wireless networks in public places. Anything that will protect my traffic.<p>It's hard to tell just searching online what is legit info and what is marketing junk.
If you just want to browse securely, a VPN might be overkill. Just set up a free EC2 account or get a cheap VPS ( <a href="http://prgmr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://prgmr.com/</a> ) and SSH tunnel through that.
Use the Amazon AWS Free Tier[1] and setup OpenVPN[2]. Clients for all major platforms are supported. If you need to protect iPhone or Android traffic, use PPTP or IPSec and you're set.<p>[1] <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/free/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html" rel="nofollow">http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source.html</a>
There's my old standby for anything sensative: SOCKS5 Proxy via SSH (just use -D:8080 on your cmdline and use FoxyProxy or whathaveyou)<p>if you're <i>really</i> overkill, you can always just use -X with SSH, fire up Firefox or Dillo or Chrome on your server and just tunnel X.<p>Just keep a reasonable quality machine (say, 1.4Ghz) running SSH and your favorite flavor of linux.
Thought that you might be interested in this old thread :)<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966021" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966021</a>
vpn doesnt work likes this - it is 2 sided, not one sided like a computer connecting to an unsecured wireless access point. unless the access point also supports the vpn, it wont work.
what you want is some sort of anonymizer like tor