What is HamachiX (Stable Version for OS X Leopard) Release: 0.9 (1C3)

HamachiX (0.9 1C3) was just released for OS X Leopard on April 22, 2008. They have addressed many issues that had arrised due to the recent updates in Tiger and Leopard.

A brief description to anyone out there who isn’t familiar with Hamachi.

“Hamachi is a simple, secure, and effective alternative to VPN. If you have ever wanted to access your home computer from the office, hotel or internet cafe look no further. With Hamachi there is no need to configure you your firewall by opening ports and exposing you computer to nasty threats lurking on the web”

This past weekend I used the Hamachi service to help secure my activities on the internet. We had the pleasure to attend PodcampNYC this weekend. Alike many conferences we attend there is always access to event Wifi. I am a bit uneasy when using free open internet access. This access is not only available to attendees who where at the event. It could have been used by anyone who was in reach of the wifi signal. These connections were unencrypted and being used by people I do not know. So I do tend to become a bit concerned about my privacy.

I had installed Hamachi on my WindowsXP machine along with a Proxy server at home. Having this setup allowed me to tunnel all of my internet traffic from the Hotel and PodcampNYC wifi through my home internet connection fully encrypted. (Email, IM, Twitter, web surfing, Skype and IRC.) was protected if anyone were to be sniffing wifi traffic.

When using Hamachi there is no need to configure your hardware firewall (no need to port forward). Just download, install and configure Hamachi. Create a network name and password. Once that is completed, install Hamachi on your (Windows, OS X, or Linux) machines. You now have created a Hamachi network. When creating your Hamachi network password. I would suggest generating a fully secure password at GRC.

This is in my opinion a very easy way to secure your internet traffic. It also helps protect your privacy when logging into unsecure websites and using non evcrypted IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger.

I will be sure to post a video tutorial on how to set up Hamachi along with a Proxy to tunnel your traffic using this service.

Download Hamachi for Windows, Linux and OS X (Free service and Premium service available).

Hamachi wiki