OT best free wifi in Cambridge Re: Q: Why does my firewall hate the cambridge picturehouse?

[Paul M]

the biggest problems to my mind of open wifi are

1/ other users on the access point can probe your machine, e.g. if you
set a windows firewall up wrongly it may consider the "lan" as trusted,
even when it considers what's beyond the gateway as untrusted

2/ cookie sniffing allowing people to steal your login on many sites; at
least google make it easy to switch over to using https for the entire
email session and not just logging in. SSL can pose quite a burden on a
web server so I understand why this is done. Before I use a wifi hotspot
I always clear my cookies just in case, and ensure any thing on my
machine which does automatic logins are disabled (skype, messengers,
voip, etc). If I used wifi hotspots more than once in a blue moon, I'd
create a separate login which was deliberately bare.