An interesting new release from Google — they now offer software to help you secure your wifi connection. Put briefly, it seems to install a virtual network adapter representing a VPN connection to Google, then redirect all your traffic through it. It's very similar to OpenVPN's setup, except that the installation is smoother, and of course Google is providing the VPN backend.

I haven't tested its throughput, but I can confirm that it doesn't require wifi. So for those of you daunted by my SSH howto, this could be a good, easy solution (until your IT department starts blocking it, that is). Oh, and Aaron: this will probably let you get around MLB.com's policy of blacking out webcasts of Nats games for DC-area IP addresses (all of your traffic will appear to be coming from Google's servers). It may not be fast enough for streaming video, but it's worth a shot.

For those interested, it looks like the program sets up the connection over SSL — from there Ethereal seems to think that it's sending data out using compressed PPP, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (I thought PPP was a protocol that runs under TCP/IP, not over it). Maybe someone with better networking credentials can fill me in on how this works.

UPDATE: Of course, now I realize that it's PPTP — tunneled PPP. Which is one of the two big VPN standards. Nothing unusual here. PPTP is encapsulated in TCP/IP and sent to the host. Wikipedia's got something about it here, although the GRE portion of the protocol remains less than clear.