How Secure is Your Wi-Fi Connection?

New York Times blogger David Pogue describes how easy is it for anyone to capture your wi-fi conversation from a few feet away.

That’s all it took. He turned his laptop around to reveal all of this:

* Every copy of every e-mail message I sent *and* received.

* A list of the Web sites I visited.

* Even, incredibly, the graphics that had appeared on the Web sites I had visited.

None of this took any particular effort, hacker skill or fancy software. Anyone could do it. You could do it.

All John needed was a “packet sniffing” program; such software is free and widely available. (He used a Mac program called Eavesdrop.) It sniffs the airwaves and displays whatever data it finds being transmitted in the public hot spot.