This is scary - I'm wondering if I should post it in Press, considering how often I see Buffistas posting from airports....

Holiday Travel Tip: Avoid airport honeypot networks

Air travelers looking to do a little web surfing at the terminal should be on the lookout for "honeypot" wireless networks set up by folks who want to listen in on your usernames and passwords. Blogger Domenico Bettinelli writes:

I was recently at New York's JFK airport in the JetBlue terminal, where they have prominent signs offering free wi-fi, courtesy of the airline. But when I went to connect, I noticed that several options were available including one labeled "default" and another labeled "JetBlue free hotspot." It turns out that the former was the actual free hotspot and the latter was the honeypot.

I've been in that terminal and seen plenty of suspicious Computer-to-Computer wireless networks in my Airport list, too - but nothing as deliberately deceptive as "JetBlue free hotspot." (Bastards.) To be absolutely safe, your best bet is to refrain from hunting down free wifi at the terminal and either pay or do what I do: bring your own connection and use your cell phone as a modem.

I'm wondering how prevalent this is, and can airport authorities do anything to fight it....

At O'Hare a warning message like this pops up the moment you try to connect to wireless. It tells you the name of the legitimate (alas, for pay) wireless network and claims that all of the others are operating out of someone else's laptop, fishing for passwords.

Yeah, there are no legit free networks at O'Hare, are there?

Firefox 2.0.0.1 tip.

If you upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.1 and your menus start acting funny, not working all the time when you use your mouse to select a menu, then revert back to the default Firefox theme.

I have a weird problem...my Mac keeps crashing! I don't mean beachballing, I mean crashing. Every so often, it will freeze up and cease responding to keystrokes or mouse clicks. (Right now, I can't even *move* the mouse.)

Any ideas, other than restarting it with the power button? The usual force-quit keystrokes aren't doing me any good.

(Obviously, the solution to the crashing problem in general is to not run all of my video editing/encoding applications at once, but right now I just need to get it responsive again.)

You could try logging in remotely from a command-line, but if you don't already have remote access enabled, it's too late.

If you upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.1 and your menus start acting funny, not working all the time when you use your mouse to select a menu, then revert back to the default Firefox theme.

This happened to me. The person who developed the theme I've been using updated it today, so now the menus work, but the fix doesn't appear to be a particularly elegant one (i.e., the menus are now kinda funny looking).

Jessica - what kind of Mac?

Does this only happen when you're maxing out the CPU? The only thing I can think of is if you have a Mac that changes CPU speed depending on load (isn't that all of them now?) and if the cooling fan isn't working, it might be overheating during times of heavy use.

It's an almost-new Intel MacPro, and yes, it seems to only happen when I'm running a million different programs at once. I wonder if it could be the fan...

I think the MacPros have about six cooling fans.

Can you monitor CPU temp? iPulse [link] can do that (at least on my MacBook). Then if we can figure out what the max temp should be, we can see if you go over that.

eta: Also, when you're running the gazillion programs at once, are they using the CPU a lot? If not, then maybe you have bad memory and it's only a problem when the memory is maxed out, or nearly so.