An SSH tunnel is a great way to quickly setup a secure method for browsing the web from an unsecure location, such as a public wireless network. All you need is a machine running an SSH server. I setup a tunnel from my Mac OS X laptop using the following command:
ssh -C -D 7070 dinomite.net
This sets up a tunnel, locally accessible on the laptop on port 7070 (-D 7070), that sends any traffic through the encrypted and compressed (-C) SSH stream to the server, where it is spit out onto the net as normal. To use this tunnel, I simply instruct Firefox to connect via a SOCKS proxy on port 7070:
Many other applications, such as Adium, support SOCKS proxies and can be set up in a similar way to send their traffic to port 7070 and take advantage of an SSH tunnel.
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