Wireless Hacks

Location Support for Tunnels in OS X

Easily choose between encrypted and unencrypted communications using the Network Location feature in Mac OS X.

It is possible [Hack #91] to encrypt your web traffic by passing it over an SSH tunnel to an HTTP proxy. While you might think that you would always want to keep your web traffic encrypted, there are cases where it just isn’t practical to do so. For example, if you are using a wireless network that makes use of a captive portal (such as NoCatAuth) that redirects the user to a web page before granting network access, then your tunnel will fail to connect. Of course, after you have authenticated, your tunnel will work as it normally would. But you need to connect to the authentication service “in the clear” in order to present your credentials.

Another common reason to disable the tunnel is to download large volumes of public data from a local network resource. Rather than force all of the data to be encrypted, routed all the way down to your tunnel server, and ultimately sent back again and decrypted, it is probably much more efficient to connect directly and download it in the clear. Ask yourself the question, “does it really matter if people on the local wireless know that I’m downloading a Debian ISO from a local mirror?”

While in most operating systems you would have to change the preferences of your browser in order to choose not to use the proxy, OS X has a much more elegant solution. There is a very flexible network configuration ...