DescentBB

Or I might ask first what would I want to use a proxy server for? Or another way of puting it, what is a proxy server?

Did read that. Could I use Foxyproxy in a hotel with wifi access to keep them from being able to "see" my computer...passwords, websites I visit....?

no

Anyway to do that?

Only time I ever found use for a proxy was to bypass YouTube's, "this video is not available in your country" Beyond that I find them worthless for browser use.

First rule is do not enter any personal info on a network you don't trust. A firewall will stop unwanted visitors from entering your computer. Data leaving your computer is another story. Even if the signal leaving the computer is encrypted. This is absolutely no guarantee the data is safe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network

The best way to keep hotels from snooping your traffic is to set up an encrypted VPN, and then tunnel all of your internet access through it.

So what happens is at home you set up a VPN server that runs all the time, then when you are at a hotel you connect to your VPN and route all your internet traffic through it. The result is everything you download from the internet first comes through your home connection, then gets encrypted and sent to your laptop at the hotel, where your laptop decrypts and displays it. The hotel cannot know what you are doing because all of your traffic is encrypted and only goes to a single IP, and to the web sites you visit it appears as if you are at home.

There are also VPN services you can subscribe to for a monthly fee that will not only encrypt the traffic to and from your computer but will also obscure your IP address and physical location by passing all your traffic through proxies, which can be used to defeat some types of internet censorship and also regional blocking. Here is one such example: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

Note that these examples often come with speed limitations, bandwidth limitations, or both. If you use your own VPN server, all hotel internet access will be limited to no greater than the speed of your home connections upload speed. VPN services for sale often restrict what you can do over the VPN, for example some do not allow peer to peer file trading or other large file downloads because of bandwidth restrictions, others limit the speed you can use.

(Or if you already have an SSH server running somewhere, you can just tunnel through that.)

What Krom and Jeff said. VPN is the windows version, SSH is the Linux version.

SSH is a (relatively) common server tool that may come with a web server subscription. I don't know how much they will smile/frown upon you routing all of your internet traffic through it, but if you have a web site you may already have a server sitting there waiting for you to tunnel through.

I use SSH tunneling to get access to my apache server on the home machine- I don't want it open to the world, but I do want access to it, so I have my router forward SSH but not HTTP - if I use the SSH as a proxy, it browses to local addresses as if I were on my machine at home.

VPN is for general use, SSH tunnels for stuff that you know the ports of and don't mind typing.

Basically if you are that paranoid leave the laptop or use suck it up and use a celluar modem.

Is LogMeIn Hamach something to look into. I looked at it in the past put couldn't figure it out.

Not really.

Consider this: whats preventing the hotel from simply using your computer when you are out of your room?

The hotel internet will not be any more secure than your current home internet.

Bios password and Windows password.

Problem solved.

For your data to be secure against physical access, the solution is the same as keeping people from eavesdropping on your network traffic: use encryption.

I'm really not concerned about the maids sitting down, propping up their feet and browsing around on my laptop. I'm more concerned about what someone can see when on their wifi. Passwords, user names......

you can get a router that supports vpn, and use that.

Chances are, the hotel room will have Ethernet.