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Hello everyone, I am new to these forms. I was directed to anitionline.com through Iron Geek's website and I am happy to have come across this site.
My question is regarding how one can secure their packets over an open, unencrypted wireless network. This will be my only internet option for time being as I am moving into an apartment for college that shares an open network.
Try iPIG:
http://iopus.com/iPig/
I used it a bit last year. They've changed their subscription model and I haven't updated mine. I believe it's still free to use. One caveat: expect a slower net connection using it. Fwiw.
undreamed: What you want to do is any sort of secure "tunneling."
What this does is puts the packets you are sending to the Internet into another set of packets, in a sense, which is encrypted using some reasonably-safe encryption setup. Then, the computer to which you are connected decrypts the information and forwards it onto the Internet for you, and the same happens on its way back.
The drawbacks to this, as brokencrow noted, are that the speed will likely suffer a bit. You can use programs like iPig, Hamachi, and other "VPN" clients and servers to do it yourself, instead of going through another server. This adds another layer of security (since only your servers are re-routing the data), but it does require you have a computer set up at another location in order to act as a server. I'd recommend you get a friend whom you trust a lot to set one up for you, if that's at all possible.
Either way, there are tons and tons of clients out there for this, and a few services. Another one you might want to check out is hotspotvpn.com, which uses OpenVPN software, and also allows secure mail connections (SSL) for your clients, which is a *big* plus. I'm always really paranoid about these kinds of services, though, so use them at your own risk.