Cory makes a good case

Cory makes a good case for ditching WEP security on wireless access points, but when searching around for secure protocol alternatives, I was surprised at what I found.

First off, you have a giant (and growing faster by the day) existing market of wireless users. Most of them are tech savvy, and understand the potential security problems of using public wireless connections. When looking for help on securing my connection, I can only find one company offering ssh tunnels, and their documentation is pretty sparse on the use (they give you a command line to dump into the os x shell). O'Reilly has published article after article after article about tunneling your email connections via SSH, but the most user-friendly option of them all requires installing a scripting app and writing scripts that talk to a few local and remote files you'll also need to create and mount properly (translation: a giant pain in the ass I couldn't get working on my machine).

I, like millions of others, have spent a few hundred bucks getting wireless setup at home and in my laptop, and would be happy to spend more money making it secure (you might say most wireless users are addicted and would never go back -- the perfect locked-in market). So the question is, why isn't there a single company doing something to provide this badly needed service? Throw a linux box on a backbone, create some installers and local apps for os x and windows that will automate tunnel connections, and slap a $50-100 annual fee onto it. Make it brain-dead simple so even my grandmother can enter her user/pass into a small taskbar app and surf and email securely. Create a menu bar or dock app for os x that lets me know visually when I am tunneling all my ports, and let me quickly add new ones via a simple interface.

If anyone knows of such a service, by all means let me know about it, because I can't believe I'm not able to find one.