Question play games on unsecured system

DrCyd

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Feb 1, 2024
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Mornin'. wifi vs data. How safe is it to play a game on a public network? After a workout at LA Fitness, I like to cool down a bit by sitting and playing chess on my cell. I have a very limited data bank and this game eats up a lot of data. LAF has a public wifi. So ... How safe is it to play chess on their system and save my data... and will it save me from using data?
 
I treat all public wifi as unsafe and do not/would not use it for any sensitive purposes: financial, medical, work, etc..

As for chess (or games in general) I would not expect online play to put your cell at risk unless you download something.

At most what would be at risk is your chess site login and password being stolen. Then your ranking (if applicable) would suffer if someone played "as you".

If on a public network then play chess as a guest (provided that option exists) versus logging in.

Just my immediate thoughts.
 
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Mornin'. wifi vs data. How safe is it to play a game on a public network? After a workout at LA Fitness, I like to cool down a bit by sitting and playing chess on my cell. I have a very limited data bank and this game eats up a lot of data. LAF has a public wifi. So ... How safe is it to play chess on their system and save my data... and will it save me from using data?
Unknown. It would depend on how the specific app you use communicates.
 
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My guess is it will mostly be secure.

Almost all web pages are secured by HTTPS so if the game run in a web page it likely also is encrypted. Other app type games depend on how the vendor implemented things. Wifi is only the very first part of your data journey to the game company location. The data can be intercepted at many places. In general most traffic is encrypted in some way. Online shooter type games encrypt the data to also protect it from the user running the game from capturing and hacking his own session. .....lots of cheater in shooters that will try anything to win.

In general it is actually very hard to intercept wifi traffic. Microsoft prevents it even if the driver supports it. Not all chipset support capture and even when they do because of the complexity in wifi signal like running multiple overlapping signals with mimo it is very hard to get a clean signal.

Pretty much not a lot of interest in hacking wifi because you go though all the trouble to get past the wifi technical hurtles to find that all the data is encrypted at the application level.

I would be much more worried about tracking garbage in the apps themselves.
 
run a simple vpn and at least the data is encrypted for the first leg of the journey guaranteed.

from there it is no safer that the traffic normally is when using any other data method. as said above, i'd be more worried about all the data mining the app itself is doing rather than worrying about the chess match itself being compromised.
 
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