Many of us have been in this scenario - you’re on the move, using a random WiFi connection that you can get. You want to browse around to all your favourite sites, including ones where you log in over normal HTTP, but you’re not entirely convinced of the security of the connection, so you don’t.

If you have access to pretty much any server running SSH where you can log in, you actually can set up a secure tunnel to route all of your data through using nothing more than what you already have. Kind of like a very simple VPN, that you can do on the fly.

This assumes your client/laptop is running Linux, Mac OS X or another Unix-like OS where ssh is installed and on the command line. We’ll also be configuring Firefox as the browser to route traffic through the tunnel. Windows users can use PuTTY to achieve the same effect.

Set Up the Tunnel

From your terminal, log in to your SSH server with the normal command, but add -D and a port number, to set up your tunnel on that local port. Something like this:

$ ssh -D 1080 user@host

You’ll be logged in as normal, and the prompt should come up. What has also happened, however, is that your SSH client is now listening on local port 1080. Anything you tunnel through there will go securely to the SSH server, and responses sent back through that tunnel.

Before we move on to configuring Firefox to route through this, here are a few more options for that command. If you don’t want a prompt to come up, i.e. you just want to set up the tunnel and don’t need to actually interactively log in to the server, add the -N switch, like so:

Read the rest of Using SSH as an Ad-Hoc VPN

We’re human. We need time off. Instead of showing you how to actually do something useful today, I’m going to show you some great distractions.

They’re coming!

This one is simple. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Application dialog. Without thinking too hard, type in gegls from outer space and hit Enter. The controls are simple: Space to shoot, the arrow keys to move.

Need a companion?

There’s always the Fish applet that can be added to the panel, but why confine it to a small 20 pixel space? Right-click a blank area on the panel and select About Panels. Now, press the F key three times. That’s “fff”. Wanda the Fish will swim onto your screen and watch what you are doing. Try clicking on her now!

Protip: To kill Wanda (how could you?!) you’ll need to sign out and back in again, or alternatively kill the panel, but that may have weird side-effects. An alternate way to show Wanda again is to hit Alt+F2 and type free the fish.

Everyone’s secret ambition

At the top of the random list, it’s Zenity. Open your friend the Alt+F2 dialog again, and type:
zenity --about
Now, type in the word zen into the About dialog for a game of dress-up! Yay!

Mom, I’m out of money!

This one is my personal favorite, and is a great, friendly prank to pull on a coworker or relative. At the GDM login screen, type Require Quarter (with capitals) into the Username field and press Enter. If done correctly, there will still be a Username field, but it will be blank. Now wait for your unsuspecting victim to log in and… I’ll let you try this one out for yourself.

Keeping information safe and away from eyes that shouldn’t see it can be pretty important. Here in the UK we’ve had several instances where the government has lost personal information. Since that information wasn’t encrypted, it could be in anyone’s hands by now.

One of the most popular ways to encrypt information is using the free GNU Privacy Guard software. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to get up and running to use GPG to encrypt and decrypt some information. For now, I’m only going to cover encrypting information that only you want to get access to later, but I may follow up with how to transfer information securely to others in a future tutorial.

In this tutorial, I’ll be trying to keep things as cross-platform as possible, so this guide should be easy to follow on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X. At FOSSwire we want to try and reach out and help users of non-Linux/BSD platforms to use free software too. Let us know how you think this tutorial works to achieve that and any thoughts on this issue in the comments of this post, or you can email me - peter@ this domain.

This will all be done on the command line, regardless of your operating system, but I’ll show you more on how to get into that in a moment, once we are installed and ready.

Read the rest of Getting Started with GNU Privacy Guard