JiWire Hotspot Helper: Protecting your privacy in hotspots

{ Written on February 13th, 2008 }

If you’re one of the millions of mobile workers who can’t live without your laptop around, you’d probably made use of hotspots for accessing the Internet. JiWire Hotspot Helper, a revolutionary product in my view, was designed with you in mind.

Formerly known as SpotLock, JiWire Hotspot Helper touts the following features: an on-demand hotspot finder for finding hotspots around the world, security for your wi-fi connections, a wireless VPN that connects to a JiWire server, and a wi-fi emailer that allows you to send emails even in hotspots where email sending is throttled. Let’s examine the features one-by-one.

The hotspot finder uses JiWire’s extensive hotspot directory to help you find hotspots in 135 countries around the world. The database of almost 150,000 hotspots is installed with the program, thus allowing you to use it even while you’re offline. It allows you to search a hotspot by location, ZIP code and access provider. You can specify in your search if you want all hotspots found for a particular location, or free, or non-free hotspots. You can configure it to automatically update and to pull data only for those locations you specify.

When you find a hotspot, you can connect to it securely using JiWire’s VPN feature which, through a secure connection to a JiWire server, encrypts all traffic to and from your laptop, ensuring that you’re secure from prying eyes even while away from your own VPN. I couldn’t access my laptop using another laptop while I used this feature, effectively proving that it indeed works. JiWire’s system tray icon displays a locked icon when you’re connected to the VPN. Performance was not an issue, meaning either that JiWire servers have the bandwidth to handle your load, or that the service isn’t that that popular yet (I didn’t contact JiWire for this review).

The wi-fi emailer feature is touted as an effective way to circumvent blocking of emails sent from hotspots (operators use this method to prevent spam mailings from their hotspots). However, I couldn’t test this feature, as all hotspots I used did not block emails. However, I do use my ISP-provided email, and I was able to send an email using the wi-fi emailer while in a hotspot. My ISP normally blocks email traffic not originating from its own networks.

For just $24.95 a year, mobile workers will find JiWire worth the investment, given its nice feature set.

You can buy or download a 10-day trial of JiWire, without any limitations, from here.