[Neanderthal]

To be secure, use WPA or WPA2 encryption, preferably with "AES rather than TKIP. Use a non-dictionary password. The best ones have numbers and symbols included. This is to prevent the use of “rainbow tables”, which are basically huge files of passwords used to brute-force attack the newer encryptions. An example would be to use the first letters of all the words in a long phrase, with numbers mixed in in place of some words, thus: I Watched Lord Of The Rings 2 Times Last Night!, which produces IWLORT2TLN!

Make sure you change that phrase a couple of times a year at least.

Fine. But what do you recommend if you are stuck in a hotel with a wireless connection. Is there any way to protect your passwords?

[Little Pig]

The password I was referring to was the one you enter on your laptop to connect to your home wireless router (the one you have configured on the router). To protect your passwords on a public wireless network like at a hotel, you can do a few things. First, you can use https connections for any sensitive things you do, though that can be risky as some pages don’t encrypt the whole thing and if you’re not an expert it’s not always easy to tell. Another thing you can do is set up a VPN tunnel over the hotel connection, but you have to have a computer on the other end to complete the tunnel; you can’t just tunnel to anywhere. The most secure thing you can do is not visit any web pages that you need to protect the passwords for (bank, medical account, email, etc). Either get a cell modem for those pages, or wait until you can get to a trusted wired network.