BootsnAll Travel Community

If you take your own laptop and find the wi fi places where you can use it for the price of a cup of coffee, do you avoid these security pitfalls? I'd really like to know. It's a big decision. To take or not to take the laptop?

I think there is a risk from online banking in cybercafes but there is a way around this.

I am currently traveling around Southeast Asia and I am carrying my own memory stick / flash drive with a portable web browser on it.

Stored within in this is my username for my bank and nothing else so I don't have to type my username. I think this is important because this gets around keylogging software.

Also my bank has a random number that I have to put in each time which makes it quiet safe.

Anyway do a google on portable firefox, buy yourself a flash drive and you are away. You can also keep all your favourites on there as well as taking snapshots of pages for offline use if you travel with a laptop

Out of interest Solo which bank are you with that gives you that random number facility? Or is it a random few characters from your pwd/pin, as mine does?

we tried the boot-from-CD thing, USB key thing, and it just didn't work. either the USB thing was at the back of the machine and inaccessible, or there was no CD drive, or when we managed to boot, we encountered firewall blocks not allowing us to access the web...
I think we got it to work once, maybe twice, then just gave up.

Always cleared the cache and cookies, etc., and didn't encounter any problems.

a reasonable person standard most likely in regards to dealing with online banking in a foreign country, would be that the person would have a clean computer setup (no viruses on your computer, or spyware), made sure no one was watching him/her logon, and potentially get their password...if you take all necessary precautions that a reasonable person in your situation would take, then you are fine, most likely if that is what your bank states

Online Banking is the best way to take care of a shitload of problems while travelling. I've done it the last two trips and kept a lot of balls in the air.

In Belize, where there was no PLUS or CIRRUS system at the time(But now there is, mostly) I used to put stuff on my credit card, and then go immediately to a computer and pay the credit card, so I didn't incur interest. It worked out fine. The system is too damned good to pass up if you are trying to control things at home while you are away. Having some buddy holding signed cheques for you is just too much of a strain on either party..
D

I use E*trade online bank, and I highly recommend it.
I've got a nice check card with a visa logo... works ...

yep,i only use online banking to pay my bills now...its easy and fast. sometimes faster than getting $ out of foreign atms.