I called up the Executive Inn hotel this afternoon and confirmed that they have free, hotel-wide wifi, with wireless adapters available for those who don’t have their own. I don’t know what the connectivity situation will be at the convention proper, but I believe registered bloggers will get real, grown-up Press Credentials and access to a media room of some sort, which ought to have Internet access. Maybe Sebastian and Bitter can add something to this?

In any case, if you’re bringing your laptop and plan to get on public wifi I highly suggest using some means of securing your traffic. My weapon of choice is a good old-fashioned SSH tunnel used as a SOCKS proxy to one of my home machines.

My own setup uses computers running Linux and OpenBSD, meaning that any instructions I write would be irrelevant to the 90%+ of you who use Windows. So, if you’re on Windows and you’re interested in setting up something like this, I suggest you take a look at this guide. I haven’t actually used those directions since I don’t have any Windows PCs, but they look quite reasonable. Not that you’d have to leave your home PC up and running, with an SSH server installed and configured, AND your router doing the appropriate port forwarding.

Oh, and be sure to set up Firefox to do your DNS lookups over the proxy if you’re really paranoid.

Me? I’m not paranoid; I’m just security-conscious. Which brings me to my next blog topic: tinfoil hats - shiny side in or out?